


The Confusion of Us

by AngelOfDeath10



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fluff, Friendship, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-24 13:56:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 24,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21100592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngelOfDeath10/pseuds/AngelOfDeath10
Summary: Immediately after Rose and the 10th Doctor part once again in a fashion on the beach in Bad Wolf Bay there's a mess left to be cleaned up: their relationship. Mostly fluff.





	1. Him

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Oh heck, I don't own any of this. Just playing around with Rose and the Doctor.
> 
> Originally written in 2011.

When the Doctor had sprung into being, fully formed and naked as the day, it was a moment of fury, of disorientation, and of a supreme urgency to take care of saving the day with his usual panache. Everything up to the point of the hand being cut off was clear as if it had happened yesterday, but there was a foggy sense of more and he sorted through memories to pick and choose what had brought this him to the TARDIS after the events of that fateful Christmas.

The feral thrill of annihilating the daleks was followed by a backlash of sorrow and self-hate. He had done his duty, he had gotten revenge for the death of his people, and he was keeping the universe safe. The other him, emotionally weak, hadn't seen the opportunity and the rightness of the prophecy. The daleks' own prophet had pled for death at the end so what difference who pressed the button. Those soft years of saving lives with Rose, with Martha, and then again with Donna were like a gauzy film whereas that last battle with the daleks on the satellite was fresh in his cellular memory. The other him forgot so quickly, it seemed.

And that included Rose emerging like a vengeful goddess to do the first time what should have been enough to leave them safe. The echo of her voice, the raw power leaking from her human shell as she had turned the emperor-god of the daleks to dust, he had been so proud and so whole. For a while, even if she didn't remember it now, she had been more powerful than a Time Lord and he had had a true companion. If he had been fond of her before, willing to cross worlds to save her, he loved her then.

In Norway, on a beach with an ill fated name, he watched the scene unfold between Rose and the Time Lord version of himself that he understood so well intellectually even if he didn't agree with his methods. He knew the other Doctor was making a case for Rose to stay here, with him, and he knew well enough to stay silent and watch himself manipulate her into doing as he thought best.

All the Time Lord Doctor needed to say were three little words, and he wanted to so very much, but she would never stay if she heard it from him. The Time Lord looked to the half-human and silently they agreed. The words had to be said, and they had to come from the one who could grow old and die with her. The conspiracy was made all the sweeter by her immediate and very physical reaction which jolted every new nerve in his freshly-generated body.

Somewhere, on a parallel Earth, he wondered if another him was regretting the decision.

Scratch that, somewhere on a parallel Earth he knew another him was full of regret. But the Doctor moved on with life, he found new distractions and locked away the bad times so deeply even he couldn't remember them sometimes. The gauzy memories told him Rose had a lot to do with forgetting those bad times.

In doing what was best for Rose they had made both her and her original Doctor miserable, but if the Doctor knew anything he knew Rose Tyler couldn't stay away from him. Impatient even at the best of times, 900 years notwithstanding, he only hoped he wouldn't scare her off before she was ready to see him for what he really was: mortal, half-Time Lord, and very much in love with her.

He squeezed her hand, excited about what this world had in store for him.


	2. Her

It had been a month since that cold beach in Norway, but the confusion hadn't lessened much. In fact, it had grown rich and complex while taking on layers that Rose knew she wasn't very emotionally prepared to face.

The prospect of death, sure she had faced death a hundred times over and come out with little more than a few broken bones and a triumphant head brimming with adrenaline and relief. Even in deep space on dark nights, or whatever served as night on the TARDIS, death didn't do much beyond give her a momentary chill.

Losing loved ones was always a distinct possibility. With her mom, Mickey, and now her new little brother and dad she had a lot to lose. If they were in danger she would run to save them without a second thought for the risk involved or the odds of coming back at all. That wasn't Rose Tyler's way. A heart so big it trampled all over her good sense, just like her mom. Just like her Doctor, come to think of it. His loss had been unimaginable and resounding. Loss had been a way of life for her since the first time in Bad Wolf Bay, but never defeat.

The second time she had to say goodbye forever to her Doctor had felt like a defeat rather than merely the obstacle the first one had been. It was so final, so utterly foreign to her, to see him there withdrawn and tense. The giddy rush and illuminated smile had all been used up in that initial ill fated run down the London street where the dalek had shot him, she supposed.

She had wanted to go with the Doctor, the lonely Time Lord, but he had befuddled her with this other him and by leading off with the knowledge that the other him was mortal and constant despite possessing his intellect and memories. This other man, who the Doctor said was him, hadn't been in the room with Davros but instead in the burning TARDIS. This other man was him, but not, again possessed of a desperate ruthlessness that had led him to committing genocide.

Heal him again? When had she healed him the first time?

By the time her lips had locked onto her half-human Doctor and the distinctive sound of the TARDIS pulled her back to reality it all seemed like a bad dream. The unimaginable had happened: either she had lost him again by turning her back on him or he had left her. That wasn't entirely true, though, with the half-human Doctor here on the other Earth.

A hand slipped into hers tentatively, then gripping her so hard she flexed against his hand and pulled back just a bit. They stared at one another, and that is about where Rose Tyler became possessed by the confusion that still tore at her a month later.


	3. 30 Days Later

"Rose!" The cheery sound of someone banging on the door to her room filled her with resentment yet again that this earthbound Doctor was a morning person. He never did seem to notice time of day even at the best of times. "I have to show you something Rose! It's fantastic!"

A low groan leaked out from between her lips right before she smothered it by placing the pillow next to her over her face. It seemed that was all the invitation the Doctor needed as a high tone was followed by the door popping open and revealing the mad, dashing, and extremely grease smeared visage. What she could only assume was a new sonic screwdriver was clutched in his hand, the project that had taken all his waking hours in the past two and a half weeks.

She wondered if he had bathed in that time. It seemed she was going to discover, as he rushed over to show her the new model he had finished up in the Tyler's basement lab after beginning the project at Torchwood.

"It's not as durable as mine since you humans don't have access to all the metals that make constructions like these relatively easy in another few hundred years, from what I can tell of this Earth's timeline at any rate." Rose listened to him prattle about other technical differences while she checked the clock. It wasn't even a quarter to 4 in the morning yet. When was he sleeping these days?

"Rose? Did you even hear that last bit?" She flopped an arm over her eyes and tried not to snap at him. The point of a vacation was that you didn't have to have 4am wake up calls about alien tech and emergencies involving a certain Time Lord. Er, or half-Time Lord in any case.

"It's brilliant. You're so happy. Building us a spaceship next?" Flat tones betrayed the sarcasm, but the Doctor wasn't perturbed in the least. She should be happier for him, lord knew he had been in a rare funk since discovering all the foibles that came with being half-human, and in this moment he was practically back to his old self (or was that old old self?).

The Doctor paused for a moment, expressive hands making a little twirling motion as he reflected. "Interesting thought and possibly, but not quite exactly what I said." She heard his coat fall to the floor and felt the sink of the bed as he flopped down at the foot of it on his back. Feeling stirrings of vague alarm as she finally began to process that this was not a whirlwind tour to show off a new toy and instead an extended visit in her boudoir she felt like shrinking into herself and hiding all the clothes tossed around and work papers strewn about.

"I said, while you were apparently sleeping with your eyes open, that as I was working on the final tests for screwdriver mark 2.0 it occurred to me that you have been spending entirely too much time at home sleeping away your vacation when we could be seeing the world!" His voice was strong at first, but a yawn punctuated the word "screwdriver" and he shifted his weight to lean more towards her to speak while tossing his new re-creation onto his beige trench on the floor.

She heard and felt him hitting the wall. One of those fabulous new things he learned about his body was how while he didn't need much sleep, his tendency to push himself until the brink of exhaustion made sleep heavy and immediate. In 3 or 4 hours he'd be up and refreshed and she would still be cranky from his morning wake up call.

"Where did you have in mind?" Rose snuck a pillow in under his head and he shifted around to be up next to her and get his long legs off the edge of the mattress. He was on top of the covers, extra blanket being dragged up with him nearer to Rose.

"Paris. Or possibly New Orleans. Jakarta if the weather permits."

"I wouldn't mind seeing Paris again."

From the light in the hallway she could make out the bags under the Doctor's eyes now, and how his hair was greasy and a bit matted. He'd been living in the basement and working like a madman, and apparently had gone so barmy he thought the next logical step was not a shower and a sleep in his own bed but to rush up and talk about vacation plans with her before hogging Rose's own mattress.

"Tomorrow then…" His hand was reaching out for hers, and from force of habit she met it and entwined their fingers. Before she could pull away he was asleep, and Rose cursed her luck. Even with the Doctor asleep on top of the covers, the mere fact that he was next to her would mean she wasn't going to get back to sleep tonight for some time. She was too aware of his presence and this is the closest they had been physically in weeks.

It had also been the most they had spoken in days. Right up until that furious knocking woke her up, she had been almost a week with hardly a glimpse of his coat tail let alone carry on an extended conversation. The separation hadn't done much to relieve her agitated state regarding him, but she suspected he had worked on more projects than just the screwdriver in order to give her some space.

"You beautiful, infuriating man," she whispered as she used the machine grease still coating his hand to extract her own and then smooth back the hair on his forehead. Rose slipped out of bed and into a robe while she cleaned up her cluttered room. She couldn't be in bed with the Doctor, but she didn't want to leave him all the same.

Clothes were tossed towards the general direction of the hamper and papers found their way to a desk in piles that she'd evaluate later. One red folder with classified stamped all over it made her wince and promise to herself she'd make a special trip to Torchwood tomorrow to return it.

How peacefully he slept, she thought enviously. Where she had dropped his hand, it still lay at an awkward angle to his side. Rose may have lived in the luxurious Tyler estate and have a room as big as her whole mansion at Powell Estates but it felt too small and stuffy to hold both her and the Doctor in it. She was inexorably drawn and somehow the last place she thought she wanted to be was exactly where she ended up.

"Moth to a flame," she reminded herself, but as she clasped his hand again and slipped under the bedding she couldn't bring herself to care.


	4. 31 Days Later

Waking up to an empty bed didn't bother her half so much as the smears of dirt and grease from its other occupant who had somehow slipped out without her knowledge. The Doctor was full of tricks, and getting out of a bed without waking the person next to him was only minor magic. With a sigh, Rose dragged herself up and began to strip the bed. It didn't matter that they had maids and a cook in the Tyler home, some things were better to do yourself now and then.

The hamper was bursting, but somehow she found a clean pair of jeans and a top that would breathe if she had to start running suddenly. Her days with the Doctor had taught her the use of a truly comfortable and versatile wardrobe. You could lose valuable time trying to run in formals.

She ran a brush through her hair a few times and grabbed a hair tie which she used to fashion a messy ponytail as she made her way to the kitchen. When she entered she found the Doctor chatting with the cook, in Italian, and when it was the cook who noticed her presence first she couldn't help but feel a bit put out. Ignoring her, giving her space, barging into her private areas, she had no clue was the method was behind his madness these days.

"Roberto says that we should visit Florence, not Paris. But it's your vacation so I refuse to give you any number of exciting reasons that Florence could interest you. Though apparently there are hundreds and Roberto had only gotten to the 12th."

"What makes you think you're coming with me?" She meant it to sound teasing, but something peevish in her voice wiped the smile off his face for a second. "I'm kidding." She hadn't been able to do anything quite right around him yet. It was all discordant right up until…

He slid onto a stool at the kitchen counter and beckoned her over. Next to one another, digging into reheated crepes that the Doctor no doubt requested be made long before Rose woke up, their shoulders brushed as the Doctor resumed the conversation with Roberto in Italian. This is what was so seductive right now, the familiarity, the way her body practically hummed when they were close. He had taken the time to get cleaned up so he was in his usual blue suit and smelling of soap.

Their knees bumped and Rose felt herself start as the Doctor cleared his throat and finished up with a wave of his hands and a laugh in Roberto's direction. Giving her space again, she thought almost angrily and she stuffed a bite of crepe in her mouth too large to chew easily as a way to keep her mind occupied.

"I didn't know you liked them so well, would you like another plate? This body seems like it needs constant refueling and I'm amazed at the urgency of it all. How do you do it every day, attending to all the maintenance of this physiology?"

"When you grow up with it, it isn't so strange. I'm sure there were things you did growing up that I couldn't imagine."

It was the wrong thing to say, and she knew it when the light in his eyes dimmed and he was centuries away on another planet. "Yes, you're certainly right about that." He sounded vague and distracted only to snap back to her with the determination of a war vet who long ago learned deflections for things he didn't want to discuss. "Have you packed yet?"

"What?"

"I expect the zep will be ready to take off in another 20 minutes so there's no sense in delaying departure. Really Rose, you'd think we hadn't discussed this already."

Sputtering a bit, Rose got up from her stool and poured herself a cup of morning tea. "Storming my room like the beaches of Normandy so we could talk about… about… vacation plans at 4am hardly seems like something you could expect me to take seriously!"

The Doctor got up and picked the tea from her hand, his skin brushing hers and leaving warmth that slowly spread. She tried to attribute to the mug, but that became less believable as he led her by the hands to the stairs again and the feeling intensified. "Think of all the remarkable things you take for granted every day, Rose. You wake up in a stationary living space, you breath oxygen mixed with a thousand other things that could kill the species of any number of other planets, and you place colored and textured chemicals on your skin in a ritual that millions of female humans replicate to various affect. And you look lovely by the way." He squeezed her hand and met her eyes in that way that made her knees weaken a bit. "So get up there and get packed because we take to the air in 18 minutes!"

Her feet moved on their own and she was already to her door when a stubborn voice in the back of her head told her something was up with all this. Why was he insisting they go somewhere together after weeks of isolation? Why now? And what did the sonic screwdriver have to do with all this? Somehow it all had to be connected, and her instinct for these things had always been asset to the Doctor in their travels to the point where he didn't even bother curtailing her investigations towards the end of their time together. There was more to this trip than an attempt to get her to snap out of her semi-depressed funk.

Ten minutes after the Doctor had sent her on her merry way, Rose was shoving too many clothes into a too small suitcase. Most of the clothes were dirty, but she'd worry about that later. The Doctor was always rushing, and ironically she never had enough time when he was driving the agenda.

Bent over the case, swearing in every language she could think of, she tried to get the sides to meet so that the clasp wouldn't pop in mid-flight. An amused snort from her doorway made her start and the Doctor stopped leaning against the frame to come in and give her a hand.

"How many years did you pack for?" He was smiling more, but through gritted teeth as he pressed the top down with his whole body and did the clasps for her.

"Just because not all of us can wear the same suit every day like some people doesn't mean you get to judge."

"I never!"

"Are you saying you have a whole closet full of the same thing? Don't lie to me Doctor, we went shopping together for you if you recall."

The Doctor sat on top of the barely closed suitcase and rested the palm of his hand against one cheek. "And if you'll recall I didn't come home with half as much as you and Jackie."

"My mum does like to shop, doesn't she?" With a young child to shop for, Jackie never ran out of reasons to visit the shops these days and with Pete's fortune they could afford it.

"She's a champion. And can she ever haggle! Fearsome. Positively ruthless."

They were sharing a laugh and as the room quieted she noticed the intensity of his gaze, and the way she thought perhaps his eyes had flickered up from somewhere else to meets her eyes at the last second. Her heartbeat sped up and she wondered how his one heart was faring. It was so damn easy for him! Gone a year or a week or an hour and always he could insert himself back into her life like nothing had changed!

Unable to follow the tenor of her thoughts, the Doctor at least recognized that it was time to give her time and he dragged the overstuffed bag with the care of an unexploded bomb towards the general direction of the front door. A car would take them to the airstrip and Rose grabbed her bag with some other essentials as well as grabbing the passport she never thought she'd need that Mickey had delivered to her years ago.

Mickey. He was alive somewhere in another plane of existence, doing good, fighting evil across the universe with Harkness or whatever government agency he felt like joining. He had come a long way from small time computer hacking and scavenging the internet for alien sightings. He had chosen the world of his birth, but Rose hadn't been given a choice. Or had she simply made the wrong choice?

"Rose?"

At the Doctor's voice calling from down the hallway she started and almost angrily stuffed the passport into her jewelry case only to slam the top down. It wasn't valid here anyway. She should shred it when she got back from France, or incinerate it. Holding onto it wasn't going to bring Mickey back over the Void for a chat and a cup of tea.

"Coming!"


	5. 31.5 Days Later

"What happened, they take a shortcut and get lost?"

"I may have suggested a scenic route." The Doctor leisurely took a seat next to her by a viewing window in the undercarriage of the zepplin which, while privately owned by Pete Tyler, was about as conspicuous as anything could be with his newest product VitaLift advertised across its side. It was one of the tackiest things Rose had ever seen, but the goofy shamelessness that had gotten her own father nothing but scorn had made this one a multimillionaire so she couldn't complain too much. Her new dad made her mom so happy after all and being rich wasn't such a hardship.

Rose smiled at the Doctor, seeing his searching glance and didn't know what to say to him. There was something so expectant between them and it was both thrilling and exhausting.

"Could you get me a VitaLift? I figure if we're a billboard I might as well try some of this new energy drink." Rose knew it tasted like swill, with enough yellow and blue dye in it to raise distinct health concerns in her mind, but all energy drinks were like that.

"You know the only vitamins in it your body can possibly use is the vitamin C, and you could get more from biting into a lemon… not that I'm disparaging biting into a lemon. Quite refreshing if you're in the right mindset." At her half smile and arch of the eyebrow he got the hint and sauntered off to locate the minifridge somewhere in the cabin.

VitaLift. Ick. She'd have to truly give it a go when he came back with it, so that he didn't suspect anything. The viewing area was so intimate, tucked down in an indentation in the floor where you could see the continent pass so slowly you felt like you could lazily stretch out a hand and brush the treetops. He had finally "found" her despite probably knowing where she had been hiding for half the trip. The drink was a stalling tactic, but not a sincere one since all Rose wanted was to compose herself.

"There were three flavors, and I choose the one that looked the least radioactive for you. Though there might be some inherent pleasure in consuming toxic looking things that I hadn't suspected until now judging from the number of them you humans like to consume…someday I expect you to explain blue raspberry to me. Someone's got to know."

"This is fine." Stifling a smile, Rose took it from him and as their fingertips brushed she shivered, followed by a faint trace of guilt deep inside her mind. "Come on and see the view. 's no TARDIS, but the Earth has its charms."

"I've been telling people that for centuries, but for some reason no one seems to want to experience things like Easter, which is decidedly more fun since it become more about finding eggs and eating candy than some of those fertility rites that used to go on. Very messy."

Maybe a nice hole would open up under her, leaving the Doctor alone to discuss Earth fertility rights. Why couldn't he talk about aliens like he used to? But then, she supposed if she could never visit Earth again she wouldn't be belaboring the point or trying to remind herself of it. Losing the TARDIS and the freedom it brought both of them resonated even now for her, years after she was first deposited in this parallel world by chance. The fresh loss of it for this newly regenerated Doctor had to be deep.

"I always liked the bit where we had lamb for supper. With mint jelly." She looked at the horrible drink, realizing she was making herself hungry and the only thing present was an approximation of liquid. "And mum would buy me a new spring dress the next day, because any excuse to shop was a good one."

Memories before him were so safe. She could feel them wrap her up and take her back to simpler days before she knew things like alien weapon specifications and the properties of a hundred catalogued dimensional anomalies. Days when the hardest choice she had to make was the spring green or the pastel pink flower print.

"I'd look at everything with her, and I'd be so picky that eventually she'd get fed up and make me decide. Then we'd have lunch somewhere and I'd hold on to that bag so tightly. It was mine, you see, and I wanted to run home straight away and make my best friend two floors down jealous." With a little laugh to herself she found she was leaning against him, like the old days, flush against one side and her head tilted to rest slightly on his shoulder.

As she stiffened, he took the opportunity to grab her hand and play with her fingers. He'd smooth over her nails with the pad of his thumb and look straight into her eyes with his own wide open and giving her full attention. The full attention of the Doctor was something she craved and dreaded in turns, but she wasn't sure how to feel about this Doctor so she just ignored it and finished up her little walk down memory lane.

"She moved away, Shirls did, when I was eleven. Her dad got a job in Scotland. She wrote me a couple times, like a penpal, before we got too old to carry on with it. I bet she has kids now or something." Some clouds in the distance made her wonder if there was more air outside. It felt like she was pulling in deep drags of air and getting no oxygen at all. "You probably don't—"

With a muffled gasp, she felt the Doctor's lips slide over hers and Rose leaned into the second kiss they'd shared in this parallel universe with all the ease of the first. The hand that had been stroking her fingers ran up to cradle her face and slide through her hair. It was a bit awkward, a sideways kiss in an uncomfortable alcove, but she was sure the blood rushing through her ears was loud enough for him to pick up on. God she wanted this so much, wanted him, would take him… but the body and the mind were not entirely united on this front.

The worrying thought was that if he kept kissing her like this, with his cool lips sliding over hers at once shy and demanding, then it was possible she wouldn't really care. She had to get a handle on this situation before it progressed to the next step, which involved all sorts of delicious prospects like a personal and private lesson in Time Lord biology.

"Doctor," she tried to say, only it came out a muffled mess against his mouth. She could feel him smile before he pulled back to give her some space. What he didn't realize is that there wasn't enough space in the galaxy to calm her down when he was on her mind. "Doctor," she said more clearly though still muddled in her thoughts, "What exactly did you mean by vacation?"

"I won't apologize for that, Rose. I know you're not very sure about me, but I'm completely rock solid sure about you, and unless I'm much mistaken about your physiology you're more than a little happy with the state of things just then." The Doctor was so brazen, it was hard not to be a little in awe of his ego. "But I actually did mean a vacation when I thought of it last night because you've been out of sorts. Need some adventure in our lives. A little trouble."

"Nothing is ever a little trouble with you."

"Why thank you Rose! It's a lot of planning and research to be a fulcrum for key points in temporal and spatial events."

She paled. "So you're dragging me to the continent to solve some sort of world endangering catastrophe?"

"Not as such, but look me in the eyes and tell me that wouldn't make you just a little bit excited."

Her heart was beating tribal rhythms against her ribs, but it wasn't in anticipation of any more trouble than she was already facing in the blue suit. Who was currently tracing a very distracting pattern on the back of her wrist, damn him. They had always been touching, back in the old days, and she remembered how casual and friendly it had been.

Sarcasm, that would be safe. "Oh yes, very exciting. And I'm sure all the running and getting yelled at or bruised up is your idea of a good exercise program, but I intend to do my vacation properly. You dragged me out here, and we're doing something relaxing!"

"That's the spirit." When he smiled and gave her a quick squeeze she knew that a lot of the mood had been spoiled, but being here with him, in this moment, seemed right in a way it hadn't been when they had first been left here by his other self. That was a sort of progress, yes?

"So tell me something about France." She settled herself so that she was leaned against him again, but purposefully relaxed her posture so that she fell into his lap. The land was still passing below and she could see it move despite his knees blocking her vision partially. The suit was only a little wrinkled, and it occurred to her that she didn't even know if he had packed anything for this voyage.

The Doctor took a few deep breaths, and then with something like a sigh and a laugh together he launched into the time he spent among the Gauls, particularly about some troubles he had with druids. Thankfully, he didn't seem to be interested in talking about any more fertility rites.


	6. 35 Days Later

"Keep it elevated, the bleeding should stop soon." His suit was well and truly ruined now, Rose thought. Blood was murder to get out of anything, even with all the technology at their disposal. Maybe the sonic screwdriver could manage it, but it was secreted somewhere on him and she wasn't about to search his pockets.

"Bud, I idin't oo enyting!" The Doctor protested as he cringed against the pain. The blow he had sustained from the enormous biker would have probably knocked a normal man out if not broken a jaw, cheek, or nose. Once it was followed by a few more swift punches, Rose knew they were going to have to make a quick retreat.

Gently, because she wasn't entirely sure what the two men had been arguing about in the first place as her French wasn't as good as it could have been (she should have studied harder in school!), she took the bloody handkerchief and handed him a damp hand towel.

"You owe me a handkerchief." Red blood. Somehow the sight of him bleeding was more disturbing than any other part of this fiasco. The Doctor didn't end up in situations like this. Well, he did actually, but he always got away from them before people were smacking him around. Seems like talking oneself out of trouble didn't work so well when the person listening had only muscle mass in their cranium.

"Oo idin't ear 'im, Rose." The nasal tone through the hand towel made her name buzz. She was glad he was staring at the ceiling so he couldn't see how amused she was by the way he was speaking. "The 'hings ee zed!"

"Whatever he said didn't seem to upset you half as much as what you said back to him. And I don't know why we were in that part of town in the first place. I told you it was a horrid idea."

The shopkeeper the Doctor was trying to find was nowhere to be found in this city, and she didn't know why they were looking for him when he wouldn't recognize the Doctor anyway. The French merchant who could help them was across the Void and on their Earth, but somehow the Doctor was convinced this was a good plan.

The Doctor sighed, then cringed, and brought his face back level to the horizon. The damp towel was helping and he looked mostly fine except for the shiner on his eye and the deep bruise already forming on his left cheek. Inhuman, she thought, only to remind herself that that was technically correct.

"This Paris is not the Paris I recall. But that's part of the fun, for a given value of fun in this particular instance."

"I think I figured that out when I realized you'd gotten us rooms overlooking an apartment complex wall."

"Who spends their time staring out of hotel rooms anyway? Life is out there!" His enthusiastic reply simply forced him to wince and bring the cloth back to his face.

"I would, if there were something to look at!" This was a four-day-old gripe, and by now the lines were familiar. Instead of insisting they get new rooms, the Doctor had simply insisted they spend no time in said rooms. This seemed like a wonderful idea right up until she realized what he meant was 'let's scour the city for Mssr. Montebello, my dear old friend.' She might have been more understanding if he had told her why instead of deflecting her to interesting tidbits about history and disasters he had averted on every street corner.

"Whatever possessed you, Doctor? The man was built like a bull and looked twice as mean." Rose wandered over and put a cool hand on the back of his neck, concerned and frustrated in turns. "How you escaped that with just a bloody nose and a black eye… I thought my heart was going to stop when you went down!"

"Did you really?" He tried to look suave, and if his face hadn't been doing a fair impression of hamburger then she might have fallen for it.

"Elevation!"

***

"Seriously, mum, he's driving me up the wall!" Rose eyed the connecting door between hers and the Doctor's rooms while pressing the phone more tightly to her ear.

"Well, that's a mercy then. He wasn't doing anything to you or anyone else even a few days ago. Right worrying, given who he is!"

"I guess." Given who he was a clone of, maybe. Or whatever he was, a doppelganger? A partial regeneration? Rose wasn't entirely convinced she had a handle on it all when it came to deciding precisely what sort of man, or alien, this Doctor was. Had she ever really understood what a Time Lord was, to begin with?

"You'd know better than anyone, I'd hope." Her mother still worried that somehow Rose would disappear from this reality. The idea that a mortal Doctor would be here, anchoring her to this parallel universe, was peace of mind Rose's mother couldn't buy. At least that's why Rose assumed she was always taking his side of things these days. "Both of you have been in such a state. I'll tell you it's silly."

"That's easy for you to say! Do you know how… nevermind." Rose twined a bit of her hair around her finger and tugged on it gently as she sank onto the foot of her bed.

"Of all the people you know, I'm the ONLY one who probably gets how you feel right now, and I'll trust you'll know better than to talk to your mum like that at this age." Jackie had her parental voice on. It was getting a lot of practice with Tony and now Rose was feeling its full force. "Your father and I,"

Here there was a deep pause. Jackie, who was always pretty much grounded in the present, struggled to find words for this topic neither of them had ever broached. She and this world's Pete had been together for a while now, and it had been interesting to see them get used to one another.

Rose remembered those first months when Jackie would compare memories with Pete and Pete would ask questions about Jackie and Rose. Eventually there wasn't much left to ask and the discomfort had set in. Rose had thrown herself into her work trying to get a dimensional cannon functioning and answering any and all questions she could about alien technology she remembered from her travels. How Jackie and Pete had actually worked through the strangeness was a mystery to her. The wedding had been nice, though. It had been late summer, and the party was marvelous.

"I didn't think I'd ever get another chance, now did I? And then suddenly there he was like he was back from the dead, only he weren't my Pete. Thing is that he was." Jackie huffed. "We need to have a proper talk about this. I'm mucking it up."

"But you didn't have to choose one, mum." Rose said quietly.

"I wish I did, sweetie. That would mean there'd be two of them out there living their lives, with or without me." Jackie sighed, and the weight of it could practically reach Rose all the way in France. "There are good things! I just wish you could see them now. You're all still wrapped up in being sad."

"You weren't dumped across an entire dimension, mum." Rose got up from the bed and paced about the room, looking at the painting on the wall of bowl of cherries for what seemed like the thousandth time. Agitated, she moved around purposefully in circles, unsure of what the next step had to be.

"Neither were you, luv, you made your choice. Seems to me you're forgetting that part a little too quickly."

**

"You awake?"

From the Doctor's bed a hand went up and gave a jaunty wave before falling back to his side. He sat up slowly, grimacing, face obscured by the towel. Rose noticed that the stains were still there on his suit, brown now and dried.

"Still look a mess I see." She put her hands on her hips, as if evaluating him. "Seems like you at least kept the cold towel on it. We'll start you on hot towels tomorrow as well, and I'll go buy you some sun glasses."

"Had a lot of black eyes, then?" The Doctor smiled, arching the eyebrow above the uninjured side of his face. Against all reason she discovered she found him handsome, even like this. She wished she could just ascribe the fuzzy feeling at the back of her mind to the low lighting hitting the ancient wallpaper just so.

Rose laughed. "Had a couple of rough boyfriends before Mickey. You surprised I'd like the dangerous type?" They didn't get much more dangerous than the Doctor, even if it were more situational than personality driven sorts of things.

The apartment complex they faced was turning a golden color reflecting what was probably a fantastic setting sun. The whole room filled with light as the Doctor held out his hand from his sitting position on the bed.

_Why did you—he—leave me?_

Rose emptied her pockets of detritus, spare change, and her phone setting them on the bedside table. Now was not the time to have that conversation, but for once she felt like maybe there would be a time they could. Until then, there was whatever this was.

Firmly taking his hand, she lay down next to him and described his spectacular fail of a fight from her perspective and had him fill in the details she didn't know like, say, what was said. The Doctor held onto her hand like a lifeline, but casually told the story in a muffled sort of way through the cool towel on his face. At first Rose was indulgent but her mood became positively livid when she found out that the biker's main comments had been about her in specific, and so far beyond appropriate that would have made a sailor blush.

"Rose," the Doctor said. "You can stop trying to liquefy my fingers."

"Sorry, sorry!" She forced herself to unclench every tight muscle one inch at a time and drew in a deep breath. "I just, well, thank you for protecting my honor I guess?"

There was a short barking laugh under the towel, and Rose couldn't help but answer it with one of her own. Protect her honor? What century did she think it was? She could picture the Doctor wandering around the French countryside on a horse in his suit, and that actually did more to lighten her mood than anything else.

In retrospect, she wished she had taken a swing at the man herself, or at least give him a good swift kick.


	7. 38 Days Later

She threw down the paper in front of him accusingly. "Now what?"

"I didn't think it was an issue, though those claims the German duke made about people coming in and rearranging his garden maze somehow might be worth looking in to, now that I see it again…"

"We're on the COVER of the TABLOIDS!"

"Yes, and a very fetching picture of you if I may say, though I can't say I like those sunglasses on me. They don't go with the suit at all, and you promised me! Rose, I simply can't trust you with my long term eyewear choices in the future."

The urge to tear her hair out right in front of him was so strong, and it was only the fact that they were at a tiny café in an open air plaza that kept her from throwing an all out tantrum. There were too many people who could see, and apparently at least one or two who might secretly photo or video it.

"I don't think you understand, Doctor." Breath in. Breath out. Let him know the full extent of the problem and then maybe he would be reasonable about this. "We are, uh." She searched for something that would actually seem like a downside to him. "Conspicuous!"

Something about the way his mouth screwed up under the sunglasses made her think that he was a bit disappointed in her. "And I suppose you consider saving the world multiple times low profile? Really, Rose, think about these things clearly. Also, they have no idea who I am because they put me in the background, a little blurry to be honest. I'm amused by the speculations."

He pointed to a little bubble that listed his possible identities. "I'll admit 'oil tycoon' sounds like it has panache, though 'zepplin mechanic' is actually probably as close as they got to the truth."

Rose had taken a deep and steadying pull from her lukewarm macchiato. It seemed the Doctor was not aware of some things that had happened here before he arrived, and it actually surprised her to have to inform him of something that was common knowledge. He had even known about the tabloid thing before she did, but that didn't mean he had memorized this reality's world events yet. Or however it was he came by the uncanny things he knew.

"There was a couple years there that I was here with my mum and dad." She wasn't calling him Pete any more, but that had taken a number of months and the P still formed in her mouth before she got out dad sometimes. "You remember why I was so upset by this place in the beginning?"

There it was, the slightly condescending look. Of course he remembered. Finding a dad who was not her dad. In his 9th regeneration they had spent a significant amount of time with her actual father, and his noble sacrifice had saved them all from being wiped out of reality. (Only after Rose's interference had put them all in danger in the first place.) When Rose found him again only to be rejected, it had crushed a part of her. It had been a slow climb to where they were now.

"Well, Pete Tyler was a very wealthy and famous man. Another Jackie taking the place of the dead one wasn't too hard to smooth over, but what about the introduction of a fully grown daughter?"

The Doctor actually started. "Oh."

"Yeah. If dad had been some nobody from the Powell Estates it wouldn't have mattered, but here? Months of articles! People trying to sneak hair out of my brushes and steal my toothbrushes to get DNA samples. Other women coming forward as 'love children' or long missing brothers and sisters." Torchwood had been her only haven in those first dark months when she was barely functional from grief and totally adrift emotionally and spiritually.

"Every public appearance I made people would analyze my outfits, my hair, my facial expressions and I have to say even I was sick of me after a few weeks. Took quite a few bribes to the right people to get me out of the public eye, not that I was clubbing every night… some movie star had a drunken brawl with a supermodel and I was forgotten." She needed to stop waving her arms around. The volume of her voice was too variable and her feeling too manic, but she just couldn't halt once she went down this particular memory lane.

Her hand came down on the magazine like a hammer. "Until now!"

Birds chirped, wind moved her hair around her shoulders, and chairs scraped as an older couple sat down and began conversing loudly in French. With nothing else to feed on, Rose found her temper waning, and the Doctor's long pause after her little screed made apprehension take the place of anger.

"As arguably onc of the most famous beings in the cosmos, barring a few religious figures and military leaders, all I can tell you is that people's memories are very long however their attention spans are exceptionally short. Particularly humans." No egotism here, oh no. He was just the most famous thing in the multiverse. Rose tried not to huff sarcastically at him and instead settled for extremely closed body language and she folded her arms and brought her lips so tightly together they almost disappeared.

"And I'd like to point out that gossip is the social currency on most every planet, except Fredran III where it's illegal and punishable by public amputation of ganglia, but they aren't exactly a welcoming bunch of insectoids." The Doctor stretched his long limbs, either pretending nonchalance or affecting it as he finished with, "So truly Rose, unless you've never spread a piece of gossip yourself or enjoyed an odd magazine I'd just learn to live with it."

In that moment she wasn't entirely sure that she could refrain from giving him a second black eye to match his first one. She clenched the edge of the chair so hard she was sure she'd have fancy curly vine patterns tattooed into her fingers. It just was so unfair! How relaxed he could be when he delivered lines like that. How expectant his look was behind those stupid sunglasses that she would see how reasonable he was being.

"You're angry with me?"

Rose didn't think she could respond to that without venom so she took a bite from her pastry.

"You're angry with me." The Doctor said it with wonder, as if a miracle had just taken place at their tiny slightly lopsided table.

Wishing she could take a bite out of that picture of them instead of her buttery roll, she was just deciding whether or not to storm off when he said something that floored her.

"So this is what Mickey meant. Remarkable!"

"What?" She couldn't help the overwhelming curiosity, which, while it didn't cancel out the anger certainly sidetracked it.

The Doctor, who seemed to have no idea of self-preservation when it came to his interactions with her, actually went on. Pushing up the sunglasses with one finger to block the sudden burst of sunlight through the clouds, he explained how sometimes when they were fiddling with the maintenance on the TARDIS (something she'd never been much interested in) sometimes Rose would come up in conversation.

"He just so happened to mention how you were just as scary as your mother when you got mad. That you gave off this jaggidy pokity aura thingy and there was simply no talking to you until you decided to calm down." Rose thought of how Mickey was so lucky he was in another plane of reality right then. "And something about how he was always the one to apologize in the end, but he didn't seem too upset about that part now that I think back on it."

The blush started at Rose's face and spread down through her limbs like a tingling wave. The Doctor couldn't be that naïve could he? From the way his head was tilted quizzically to one side, palms supporting his chin, she thought he just might be. Of course Mickey never minded apologizing, even when he wasn't the one who was wrong, because after he showed up with the bag of fresh chips and possibly a flower or two they would have the most fantastic makeup sex.

"I'd just as soon get to the part where we see that this whole thing is rather silly and make up. Although, this being our first fight and all, I have to say I'm enjoying it just a bit."

"Our _first_ fight?"

"Since we became a-" he looked down at the magazine, still positioned between them like an accusation in the air. "hmm 'sizzling item' it would seem, though that word only really reminds me of bacon and I have no clue what would be so provocative about pork."

Unable to process any more of this nonsense or reconcile that fact that she was still quite peeved, Rose did the only sensible thing.

"I'm going shopping. I'll meet you back at the hotel tonight."

Retail therapy always worked wonders for Tyler women.


	8. 39 Days Later

The knocking seemed to come from everywhere at once, and Rose woke suddenly with a rush of panic. Her agitated state from the day before hadn't been entirely worked through, and her first response to this stress was to come up swinging. There was nothing to hit except air and she took steadying breaths as she focused in on the door to her room.

When it was the connecting door to the Doctor's room that burst open Rose very nearly jumped up out of her bed in alarm.

"What is with you and giving me panic attacks in the middle of the night!" Her eyes adjusted to the light behind him coming from his room.

"I couldn't wait to tell you, Rose, I've found him! Of course he wouldn't be in France any longer in this world but I didn't realize the entire facility had relocated so it took a bit of doing."

It was too early for this. The chill in the air and flat light coming off of the apartment complex told her sunrise was imminent. "Long story short, Doctor!"

"We're going to Krakow! And then straight back to England. So pack a small bag and we'll have Pete's people pick up everything else. We have to get moving as soon as a zep can get its engines spinning." He looked almost feverish in his excitement, the black eye looking more green as the bruise was already well on its way to healing. Had he slept in his clothes? Everything about him looked wrinkled.

This new turn of events sank into Rose's brain, humming with adrenaline and the muzzy dreamlike quality of waking suddenly. She sifted through her geography like index cards of the mind. "Poland?"

"Yes!" He bull rushed her, jumping onto her bed and pulling her to her feet on the mattress. The springs protested and they rocked unsteadily a moment, forcing Rose to grab at the headboard with a free hand. He hugged her tightly, while her eyes darted about, curious and worried in turns. She wasn't even sure yet whether she was done at being mad at him and here he was hugging her in the pre-dawn while she was standing in just a camisole and undies.

"Doctor, what's so special about Po—mmph" The kiss that silenced her wasn't deliberate or erotic, it was all enthusiasm and spontaneous triumph. His arms wrapped around her bare waist and he held her to him tightly. They separated and there was nothing in his eyes except for joy as he leapt gracefully from the mattress and ran back over to his side, pulling the connecting door behind him with a slam. The only thing that prevented her from falling was her death grip on the edge of the headboard.

Rose's breathing hadn't calmed down from this most recent shock when the door opened again and this time a much more determined looking Doctor stepped up onto her mattress and walked over only to tilt her head up for another kiss. If it was possible, Rose clenched harder at the metal frame supporting her, as she allowed him to slowly claim her lips. Her skin felt hot and cold, goosebumps raising on her skin. One of his hands skimmed across her hip and fluttered across her stomach before they separated again.

"It's not Poland, but what's IN Poland, Rose. And it's the only place that has what we need right now. Do you trust me?"

"You know I do." Angry or not, she looked into his face and gave the only answer she knew was true.

"I just hope that if I find what I think I'm going to find that you'll have the reaction I think you're going to have. I wanted it to be a surprise, but I don't have all the time in the world any longer, and I never could leave my presents alone before your Christmas, or throw a proper surprise birthday." Clearly his thoughts were jumbling. Somehow he was making less sense than usual, even when he was spouting scientific mumbo jumbo he seemed more in control. "But in any case the zooxanthella are waiting for us!"

Once he made another dramatic exit from her room and she was decently sure he wasn't about to burst back in, Rose took a seat on her mattress bonelessly, legs crossed and hand unwilling to release the hold on the headboard. This Doctor was getting entirely too familiar with her, and they needed to have a talk about that. They'd certainly have time on the way to Poland but she wasn't sure yet how to start that conversation. Maybe mentioning personal space and what was acceptable for friends.

…and hadn't she locked that door between them last night?

…and were they friends?

Clothes on first. There was an order to things even when you were distracted and Rose didn't need the Doctor bursting in on her in even less clothes than what she was already wearing. It seemed like a losing battle on that front, but Rose was a fighter.

***

"Are you even listening to me?" Roses placed her hands on her hips, head swiveling as she tracked the Doctor's restless path around the viewing room of the zeppelin.

"Yes, yes." He said but every so often his eyes and sometimes his entire body would dart towards the alcove with the window as if he had caught sight of a piece of Krakow. He had been like this since they had taken off. Rose left him for a while at the start to put on her makeup, but she didn't doubt he had been pacing like a caged tiger the whole time.

"Then what did I just say?" She hated it when her mother said that to her. Rose had thought she would never turn into her mother, but this was an extreme situation.

Looking peeved, the Doctor threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender and stalked over to her to tower above her in a mildly threatening fashion. It seemed she wasn't the only one in a moderately aggravated state emotionally and she couldn't help but feel a wisp of alarm as he effectively intimidated her with his physicality.

"You need space, you can't have me barging in on you in the middle of the night and in various states of undress, the kisses are very nice but you find them a bit to overwhelming right now so I need to keep my body parts to myself. Did I catch the essence of it all, Rose Tyler? Oh yes, and I'm not to kiss you again without your express permission." His eyes darted to the viewing area and Rose almost breathed a sigh of relief as she didn't have to bare the brunt of his frustration in that brief moment. "I've got much more exciting things in the works for us than your seduction, Rose, so excuse me for being a bit disappointed that you aren't more curious about Krakow and the zooxanthella than…"

The storm clouds in her eyes, from the short distance between them, had him shutting his mouth quicker than she had ever imagined was possible.

"That came out wrong."

"I'll say it did."

After rushing around for days on what she assumed was probably little to no sleep, even for his advanced body, while also healing up from a tremendous beating she saw him visibly deflate as his mood came down like a house of cards.

"All I know is I'm just making a complete pudding of myself with you no matter what I do, and even if I can't say or do anything right by you for this past month I know with total certainty that once we get back from this trip you'll understand why it was so vital."

"You always did this, you know." With an exasperated sigh Rose put some distance between them, and sank down onto a desk chair near a little antique writing table. "Brought me into the action with the story only half-told."

He cracked a weary smile. "Too much knowledge can be dangerous. I'm living proof of that."

"Things can't be exactly how they were before."

This statement turned out to be profound enough that they both kept silent, waiting for the other to broach some topic.

"I can't help myself, you know." The Doctor couldn't meet her eyes as he said this, instead his back was to her and he was ostensibly focused on the viewing area. "It's so natural to me to want to hold your hand, and, well, other things too."

"Poor impulse control notwithstanding, you might want to think about how this is for me. It isn't easy." Time to show how you've grown up a bit, Rose. Being an adult was so tiresome. "And I could stand to be a little more patient. You're you, but you're not you, too. And I guess, I suppose, we're both finding that out as we go along."

He was like a kicked puppy. How did she start out feeling so righteous and end up feeling so villainous! It wasn't even a sure thing that he hadn't manipulated the situation to turn out like this.

"So what are these zoo-things you're all on about now?" It was an olive branch. Seeing him like that, so put out and un-Doctor-like, of course she couldn't let it stand.

The slump left his shoulders and with new energy he whipped around, eyes bright and slightly bloodshot. "The zooxanthella."

"Zooxanthella. What sort of alien is it?"

"Ah ha! You are making an assumption, my dear Rose. The zooxanthella are not in fact alien, but as Earthly as you yourself. They are, specifically, flagellate protozoa." Rose had perfected the face she was giving him now through long months of his scientific garble. Wide eyes, expectant and interested. The Doctor took the cue, like he always did eventually, and restated his previous sentence. "It's algae."

"So we've been spending my whole vacation looking for algae. Couldn't you just scrape some out of the sea?"

The Doctor shook his head. "Not in the concentrations I need them in. It would take ages and I don't want to waste a single second longer. I've only got one life now, and time is of the essence."

Now honestly curious to the point of forgetting other issues between them, Rose continued her questioning. "Why are you in such a rush now? What is this algae for?"

"More of a who, in a sense, or at least I've always thought so." He pulled the sonic screwdriver out of his pocket, fiddling with a part of it. "I've been busy the past few weeks trying to get conditions right for our little protozoan friends. Getting the temperature regulation down on the tank was the hardest part, and once the tests came back positive on the stability of the hard water I had brought in from Wales then I knew! I had to have you with me for this last bit, though it's taken longer than I thought."

"I don't understand, Doctor."

Pacing around Rose instead of the viewing window, the Doctor dropped his bombshell. "Zooxanthella are, for all intents, coral food. I'm growing us another TARDIS."


	9. 41 Days Later

"It's so small. I didn't expect that."

"Well, you have to give it time. It's only just started."

"I expected a tiny police box for some reason, I don't know why. But it's just this little lump in some muddy water." Rose fought the urge to tap the glass, like when she saw fish tanks in offices. If only the TARDIS could show some sign that it was alive and well. She felt protective of that lump, unreasonably so, like a hen with its chick. "Will she… remember me? Remember us?"

The Doctor smiled indulgently but the long pause before he spoke as he stroked his chin gave away to Rose that whatever he was about to say, he wasn't entirely sure of it. "Coral can reproduce both sexually and asexually, but seeing as there's no other of her kind this should end up being a total replication of the TARDIS you knew. Of course she'll know us. Cellular memory."

The Doctor-Donna had suggested a revolutionary new method of speeding up the TARDIS' maturation cycle, but there was no guarantee in Rose's mind that that lump building itself up into a sentient time/space traveling organism would be the same TARDIS that had opened its heart to her. Not that she could remember anything after the heart opened but a few seconds of blinding light, like looking into the sun when someone told you not to as a kid. Blink a few times and the spots are out of your vision, but no matter how many times she blinked she only had shades of the last moments with the Doctor on the satellite.

That was right before he had regenerated before her eyes, terrifying her. She had thought she had lost him, with his clipped accent and his leather jacket. That version of him had been more indulgent, less protective, less eager for praise. It seemed unreasonable to miss him when he had never left, but it hadn't been entirely like before either.

"Pete was terribly nice to let me build all this in your wine cellar." There were tubes everywhere, feeding things in and filtering other things out. In a dusty corner were bottles practically in a heap. "By my estimate, if Donna's initial suggestion works out ideally, we ought to have a functioning TARDIS in, oh, 22 of your months."

"Two years is a long time." Rose sighed, willing the lump to grow faster.

"Not even two years, when it could have taken thousands. We're witnessing a first in the history of the multiverse!" The Doctor pressed his hands against the glass, as fascinated as Rose by the murky water even though there wasn't anything to see in the whorls.

"I think a toast is in order, even though you tricked me to go on a vacation that wasn't a vacation and dragged me around every factory within a few miles of Paris and then again in Krakow." Rose stood up and dusted off the knees of her jeans. There was metallic dust, and who knew what else all over the place. She'd have to get him to clean things up down here before it became a hazard if it wasn't already. The pile of wine was calling her name. The wine cellar had been a short project of the former Jackie's, and now that she was gone the current Jackie didn't want any more to do with it than Pete did. "As you promised me, it was a worthy cause and I'm absolutely thrilled!"

She opened a bottle up for each of them of the same old looking merlot. It smelled fruity and wonderful as she uncorked it, and the Doctor looked at her curiously when she practically shoved the bottle into his hand and clinked hers to his. His oral fixation and fondness for sweet things wouldn't keep him away for long.

"Don't we need glasses?"

"I think I have exactly what I need right now. I'm going to sit down here and watch the TARDIS for a while, and then I'm going to go upstairs and write an email to my boss at Torchwood."

In a brief moment of panic the Doctor looked like he was going to drop his bottle. "You're not going to tell them about the TARDIS!"

"Of course not!" she snapped. "They want to know when I'm coming back to work, and I think I finally have an answer for them." Rose watched a tube bubble and pulse in a few drops of something electric yellow. "Who else knows about this, anyway?"

"Pete. Us." The Doctor sniffed experimentally at the opening of the bottle, and then carefully read the label before touching the bottle to his lips, keeping an eye on Rose the whole time. Then he paused to add, "I have a few remote monitors, one for each of us, to keep track of how she's doing."

"Sounds kind of like a baby monitor."

"What an apt analogy Rose! It's very like one, now that I think of it."

The cellar was cold but the wine filled her with a satisfying sense of warmth. It was as if the TARDIS had fixed something broken about the whole situation. There would be new worlds to explore and new beings to meet. They would not be chained to any time unless they wanted to be. It was like the first day she had gotten a bike. The world had been hers to explore and it had been such glorious freedom.

He was staring at her, and smiling that goofy smile again.

"What? I'm not dribbling wine all down my face." Rose could feel the wine begin to work its magic on her brain, floating away her troubles on tannin.

"Is this one of those moments where you think I'm great again and I can sit next to you? Or is this one of those moments when you think I'm an old lecher and I need to give you space?" He took a drink from his bottle finally and seemed to like what he tasted because he went back for more.

"This is one of those moments when I think you have a lot of cheek." In light of everything she was feeling generous. "But you can come over and sit next to me if you like. The cellar is terribly cold, even with all this stuff in here bubbling away."

The way his eyes lit up she felt sure she had made the right choice. He plunked down next to her, shoulders touching, and began to point to different things he was planning on improving with the design of the tank system. All the technical chatter was a soothing way to make it further through the bottle even though she knew it would probably lead to trouble. Maybe she wanted some trouble, or at the very least a little liquid courage for some of those niggling questions in her mind.

"Did you know I was terrified you wouldn't like me?" He'd beat her to it, to the part of the drinking when you got painfully honest in that way you kind of wish you hadn't the next day. "As soon as I had all my faculties I just couldn't wait to see your reaction. I had no clue who I was, or what I liked but your opinion would have set the whole tone for this life for me."

Rose wasn't entirely sure if he was talking about the regeneration on Christmas all those years ago, or the one that happened less than two months ago.

"Well, you're the Doctor, aren't you?"

"I know I am, and I remember. Oh I remember all right. Beautiful things, terrible things. I think this may be one of my most selfish regenerations. Before when I had the big ears and the smashing leather jacket I used to give you all sorts of options about what we could do, but now I just want to take you the places that I like. Like I need Rose's stamp of approval. Your opinion always meant a lot to me, you know." He was jabbering. She wondered if the wine was working on him, too, but he hadn't had as much as she had yet. He seemed terribly twitchy as well, as if he were nervous.

It was her turn to be chatty. "I always thought of you as mercurial. Lovely word, eh? Every since we read Romeo and Juliet at school I always thought of Mercutio and people who are mercurial. I could see you as a Mercutio sort of man." Rose saw him unclench his eyebrows and relax his face a bit. "I bet you're thinking of seeing it performed for the first time at the Globe or some absolutely ridiculous timey wimey thing."

"Am I that predictable? Terrible Mercutio I'm turning out to be already." The Doctor turned to face her, on one knee and a jaunty look about him. " 'If Love be rough with you, be rough with Love, prick Love for pricking, and you beat Love down.' I just need some stockings and puffy shirt."

The Doctor settled back down next to her. "You're very good at changing subjects on me, Rose Tyler."

"I didn't even realize I was."

"Then again maybe I was beating about the bush too much." Making sure to catch her full attention, he cleared his throat and got on one knee. It resembled a proposal, and Rose wondered if she was about to unsettle her stomach all over his brand new trainers. "Do you like me, Rose? Genocide, mood swings, single heart, and all?"

He didn't know everything that had happened to her in the years they had been apart. The weapons training, the close calls, the sleepless nights, and the missions. She wasn't blameless, and who knew what kind of person she would be after 900 years. Would she even have had enough heart left to care about what some baby faced alien thought of her? The other Doctor had said he was a loose cannon, but in the time they had spent together he had been exactly like the Doctor she had known albeit touchier. It was hard to think of him as being so different from the man she had chased across realities.

"Yes, I like you Doctor."

"Do you love me then?"

Rose looked at the bottle, a third of the liquid was left. She downed the last of it like it was a competition and her eyes watered as she faced him again. "I don't know."

Against all reason the Doctor hugged her, then sprang to his feet and hugged as much of the glass encasing the TARDIS as he could reach around. He must have finally snapped. Either that or he hadn't heard her right.

"I said, 'I don't know' Doctor."

"I heard you the first time, Rose! This is fantastic!"

"What?"

"Well, it's not a 'no' now is it? I know enough of you and your opinions that you never hesitate to tell me when something isn't the way you like it. And right now you're in no state to spare my feelings. Indecision is fine, indecision I can work with." The Doctor smoothed back his hair and swept up his bottle of wine. He took a drink and then tossed it with flair into a corner where it shattered spectacularly. "As I said, this time around I'm a lucky man."

If he felt so lucky he should go to a casino, she grumbled mentally. Rose went about opening another bottle of wine, and damn the consequences.


	10. 58 Days Later

Rose was worried. He'd been doing so well. The TARDIS was stable (and she was sure it had even grown a bit though that might have been pure hopefulness on her part), and they had even gotten a routine going of sorts. Rose would go to her work at Torchwood, managing projects and talking to people about ongoing investigations of odd phenomena and the Doctor would come in once in a while on consultation. He had even been out in the field, resolving a minor territorial dispute which turned out to be the equivalent of someone cutting down a tree on someone else's property, only replace someone with "non-human" and the tree with "crystal energy fabrication device." He had even done it remotely, since they couldn't travel to Jupiter's moons. You'd think averting a minor war would have lifted his mood, but instead he seemed… itchy.

He hadn't spoken to anyone in more than a day, which in of itself wouldn't be troubling, but the way she had found him finally had been more than a little suspect. He'd been calibrating a dial for the backup temperature management system for the TARDIS' habitat, but she dallied a bit and saw him perform the same test again and again with the sonic screwdriver. He wasn't really fixing anything he was just zoned out.

A hyperactive mostly alien genius didn't just zone out.

"Hey you," Rose said as she approached him with relative caution. Her training had honed enough instincts in her that her adrenaline was already pumping. The drumbeat of her heart was loud enough that he surely knew he was spooking her. "Are you doing that thing again where you think you don't need to sleep? Superior biology isn't going to make up for you being an idiot."

"Oh," The Doctor rose from his workbench, dropping the screwdriver to the table with a slight clatter. As she had suspected his mind had been a trillion miles away while his hands had been on autopilot. "Yes, well, I'll just clean up down here and come to bed."

"You do know it's four in the afternoon, Doctor, don't you?"

For a second she thought something like annoyance passed across his face, but he had never been that transparent with her so she dismissed it as pure imagination.

"I'll simply install some projections to mimic the outside conditions. That ought to make the place less claustrophobic anyway. The TARDIS will appreciate that at some level as well, I imagine. Rather like playing classical music for a plant. Which gives me another bright idea…" He was chattering like normal, but there was a strain to it. Rose wouldn't have known if she hadn't spent so much time with him, but the Doctor was certainly not himself.

"Before you make a quaint parlor out of this dank dungeon I think you need to catch a nap. You seem a mess." She tilted her head to the side and blew air out of her mouth in a somewhat put upon rush. "I'll even fix you some tea the way you like it for when you wake up. And bring biscuits."

The Doctor gave her a sly smile. "Why Rose, are you trying to bribe me into sleeping? Because if so you're succeeding famously. Lead the way!"

Once they parted ways on the stairs and Rose made her way into the kitchen to see if they actually had any biscuits (Jackie had a tendency to sweep through them like a highly specific locust) she tried to shake the feeling that this incident was related to the one just the other day when she had taken him out on a drive.

There they had been, stranded in the bucolic English countryside, military grade jeep somehow with a clutch so badly burnt out that they couldn't get it moving. He had been livid and at first Rose had brushed it off with an attempt at humor. Her Doctor was someone who rolled with punches and fixed things without letting his general state of fluster interfere.

The Doctor had hopped out of the driver's seat, pacing back and forth, before charging over and slamming the hood with such force that she felt the car rock. Rose knew it took inhuman strength to leave a dent in these cars so she wasn't worried on that front, but the display of temper shook her. He was then mouthing words to himself, no doubt in some alien tongue, and gathering his composure.

By the time the Torchwood mechanic reached them the Doctor had already fixed the car with his screwdriver and was even in a mood to joke about how he could navigate time and space but some how three peddles on a car eluded him. All charm and smiles and cute factoids, but Rose had seen the other side of things. Before her rumpled brown suited, double (hard) hearted Time Lord had left he had warned that the other him was full of darker emotions and terrible anger.

How was she supposed to fix him when he hid it so well and was damned scary when he didn't? Did you just go up to someone and say 'pardon me, but I think you have a millennia of issues and I think we need to have a good sit down about them?' The Doctor had charged her with the mother of all counseling jobs. She had done it once, he claimed, she could do it again.

Rose had been a different person all those years ago, when he dropped into her life: more innocent, more trusting, more willing. Not even Bad Wolf had wrought the effect of the past years of working for Torchwood and searching for the Doctor. She hadn't known she had been helping him through terrible loss and war memories so horrifying they'd render a less stout species catatonic. By being bubbly, young, happy, and curious she had brought him about. What could she offer him now?

Apparently just a biscuit assortment with all the chocolate ones eaten out of it already.

"Do the job that's in front of you, Rose." She told herself as she put the kettle on. It didn't take too long to find her favorite mug, with the colors of the sunset in swirling patterns on it. She grabbed one that said 'No. 1 Dad' that she had gotten for Pete a while ago for a laugh, and which had been part of a set of tacky mugs. Being rich didn't mean the gifts necessarily had to be more expensive, it was more just being together for the big events that meant something now.

Maybe if they threw the Doctor a birthday party that would bring him out of this dark mood he'd stumbled into. Who wasn't cheered up by cake, booze, and gifts? Actually she could think of a number of dour agents in Torchwood, but that was entirely beside any point at all.

With a sharp whistle the kettle alerted her to the fact that it was ready, and not too much later she had a hot cup of tea in her hands that she in no way felt like drinking. She was standing by the kitchen window and looking out at the garden when someone plucked the tea from her hand.

"Hey!" Rose whirled to face the Doctor, the tea thief with his prize firmly pressed into one long fingered hand, but he was totally ignoring her and instead rummaging around the biscuit assortment. "That's mine!"

"They say possession is nine-tenths of the law, and you weren't using it for anything anyway. Don't try to deny it. Someone could have painted you in oils faster than you were drinking that tea, and did you eat all the chocolate ones on purpose? Really Rose, such cruelty." He seemed genuinely heartbroken, she mused sardonically, as she watched him polish off the rest of the biscuits in record time.

Rose wished she could conjure up a display of temper, but it was so difficult to get a proper scowl on when he smiled at her like that. Leaning against the counter looking at her as if she were the missing chocolate biscuit.

"You should be sleeping." Rose folded her arms in front of her, trying to put on her best managerial voice. "Honestly! What is so difficult about a couple hours here and there? I sleep absolutely unimaginable amounts compared to you and somehow I manage to find time for it!"

"Rose."

"I would absolutely LOVE not to have to sleep as much as I do, it would have come in handy the past few years I can tell you, not to mention when I was in school and studying for exams." Rose paced back and forth, waving her arms for emphasis.

"Rose."

"Not that I really studied much for exams. But I've gotten a lot better at…"

"Rose!" She suddenly halted in mid step, with a Doctor shaped form blocking her way. She looked up into his weary eyes and saw nothing reflect back but a storm of something he had probably been trying not to let her see for a while. "It isn't the sleeping I mind, Rose, it's the dreams."

For any other man, she might have hesitated, but this was her best friend in the universe. Even if she had moments of doubt, he was in pain and right there and she thought she could fix this specific problem if nothing else.

"I think I can help with that."

***

"Now, keep in mind I won't do this for you every night."

"It's not technically night yet, so really you aren't doing it for me tonight either." The Doctor was lying face down on his bed in just a soft t-shirt and a pair of blue striped pajama pants, and Rose gave his hair a little tug from her position in a chair beside the bed. He was being a brat, and had been ever since Rose had stepped foot into his bedroom.

"I'm taking myself straight back downstairs if you're going to be like that." She surveyed the situation and watched him fidget as he tried to settle down. While he was making himself comfortable she took the opportunity to get a good look at his room.

He didn't have enough clothes to toss about so they actually looked like they might all be in the closet with the exception of a few pairs of shoes lying about and some socks near them as if they had been taken off at the same time and forgotten. His long jacket was tossed over the back of the desk chair she was currently sitting in, and other than a slightly rumpled bed all she saw everywhere were hand drawn diagrams, (most half done or with notes all over them in various languages) and bits of machinery. To be honest she wasn't sure what was a tool in this room and what was a project half the time. The walls were covered in sticky notes, some of them readable, but it was the ones near the bed that said "remember you need sleep" and "you still don't like pears" that made a streak of fondness jet through her heart.

"I'd say you're working too hard, but we just had a holiday so it wouldn't be right to take another one."

Seeing that he'd stopped moving around as much, Rose placed her hand on his back and began to rub in great slow circles. When she was sick or restless as a child she remembered her mum doing the same thing for her and it always made her feel better. Whatever it was, the contact, the motion, having someone around, or all three, it always did the trick for her and it was worth a try for the Doctor. Sure enough, it didn't take long for his involuntary jerks to cease entirely.

He looked so peaceful there with his limbs limp and his breathing even. Rose figured it was a good signal to make a quick exit. As she got up from her seat next to him and was about to start for the door, his hand whipped up faster than a snake and grabbed her wrist painfully, constricting it with what she assumed was unconscious strength. Rose stifled the urge to fight or scream or any other reaction that would raise alarm in the house, but a low pained hiss eased from her despite her efforts.

"Do you remember," the Doctor said as his grip lessened from painful to merely incredibly tight. "That time when we went out to that very fancy place and I ordered us the special. The one that turned out to look like deep fried slugs and that tasted like someone had mixed a runny egg with kumquats?"

Unsure of where he was going with this, but absolutely sure she was still very alarmed by the whole situation, she still found her voice somehow. "Yeah. They were little blue things, with wobbly bits. I made you take the first bite… and then you told me it was delicious until I had taken MY first bite. I was so furious at being tricked."

"And we laughed our way through them. I would dare you with something, and then you would try to bribe me with something else, so that we wouldn't offend the Ylredian cook."

Rose simply froze in place as if she had been bronzed, doing the breathing exercises she had learned to slow down her heartbeat and bring down the blood pounding in her temples.

"I was thinking about that day. If it had happened all over again, right now, I don't think I would laugh." Muffled against his pillow it was hard to make out emotion, but Rose felt like she heard the strain in his voice when he added. "I think, right now, I would send it back. I don't even know if I'd laugh about it."

"People change, Doctor."

"I don't!" His grip tightened for a moment but immediately began to ease bit by bit as if he was consciously willing his body to obey. "Not like that."

Backing up a step or two, Rose sat back down. His gripped let loose when he realized she wasn't going anywhere, and as she began to rub his back again in great circles the tension in the room from all sides seemed to draw down like poison being sucked from a bite. It seemed like the right thing to do, and she let the motion lull her into a sort of daze once more.

The Doctor broke the silence again. "I know it was the only thing to be done, like gassing a hornet's nest built in a house, but the difference between him and me is I didn't even look for another way. No hesitation. Once I saw that I started to think about how else we might be different…"

"Doctor, you're just doing what I did when I was seventeen and I found a diary I kept when a few years earlier and read through it for a laugh. It was like I was reading about some really embarrassing stranger and all I could think about was how I was so glad I wasn't her anymore." She stopped passing her hand over his back and instead just let it rest, feeling the muscles shift as he tried to lean on his side and catch her eye. Once he was leaning on his elbow she placed her hands on her lap and glanced down before finding some courage to meet his gaze.

"I'm not going through puberty, Rose."

"And thank God for that! Wandering around the house all spotty and mopey, using that Time Lord mind of yours to think of new and creative ways to drive my mum and dad up the wall. Probably decide to write depressing poetry or start a band." That actually seemed to get him to smile. "Point is, I'm not who I was when we met and you really aren't who you were when we met. Changing is how you know you're alive, right?"

The Doctor rolled back over and went silent for so long that Rose wondered if he'd fallen asleep.

"When I start my band you can be the bassist. I'd ask you to be vocals, but I hear you singing in the shower from down the hall every morning and—oof" As she stormed out, Rose hoped that the smack she delivered to his back had knocked the wind out of him. It would serve him right.


	11. 63 Days Later

For a Time Lord, he had the absolutely worst problems with punctuality. Rose supposed that she shouldn't be surprised since they had often been off by years, sometimes decades, when he was trying to show her things around the galaxy. He had blamed it on the TARDIS herself now and then, saying she was drawn to certain eras or points in time but Rose was suspecting that more often than not it was an inherent issue within the Doctor. He was always where he needed to be when he needed to be there, mostly because he figured that was true. And darn it all if people didn't just agree with him. He had that effect on people. Ridiculously likeable.

All Rose knew was that she had planned a twenty minute buffer for him to meet her for dinner and he was eight minutes past the buffer. The Doctor, who always had an excuse, didn't seem to realize how aggravating his habitual lateness was. Normally Rose wouldn't wait, she'd just order, eat, and then leave a note for him when he did arrive. She was sensible in some respects, but tonight she was hoping he'd be a little more on the ball.

_He_ had been the one to ask her to dinner. Standing her up was a terrible idea when she would see him at home later. Rose had wrath that, while rare, was veritably volcanic in its force.

"May I take your order, miss?" The waitress, who had been circling with water and a vaguely pitying expression ventured to finally ask the question that had been on her lips for half an hour.

"Whatever the special is, I'll have that. Unless it has onions in it, in which case you can take those out." So fed up, she didn't even want to take a look at the menu. It was some sort of fusion Thai place and she was reasonably sure whatever they served would be fine.

"And how hot would you like it?"

"Medium is fine." She might like her curry spicy enough to peel paint, but tonight her stomach was upset enough to begin with. The whole circumstances behind coming to dinner tonight were so ambiguous. She wasn't even really sure if this was just dinner, or a date. Even more confusing was not knowing which one she wished it might be. It was all headache inspiring, though that could just be low blood sugar talking.

"And would you like to stick with water or could I get you—"

"Gin and tonic." Rose interrupted, then grimaced. Drinking hard stuff on a weeknight usually led to trouble and she hadn't felt inclined for some time to be that reckless. In her state of mind it would be all too easy to end up in an angry stupor. "Scratch that. Diet cola and a lemon wedge, please."

"I'll be right back with your drink." The waitress lingered just a moment, her eyes flickering over to the empty place setting, but Rose gave her a withering glance and she scurried off.

She was half done with her soda and scrolling through her phone for updates on the minor infestation of termites which had gotten into an older Torchwood storage facility and was compromising some crates of unclassified objects of interest when a very out of breath Doctor finally appeared next to her. He clutched some pretty if slightly damaged flowers in one hand and a tiny paper bag in the other.

"So, what was it?" Rose said as she flicked her phone closed and gave the Doctor her full malevolent glare. "I didn't think you'd forgotten the day, since you came over during lunch to ask me here, but, well, you're just unbelievable Doctor." The tone of her voice let him know quite clearly she was not using 'unbelievable' in a positive manner.

Flowers and a gift were a good step in the direction of placating Rose's annoyance, but the fact was she still hadn't eaten and the termite thing was causing all sorts of chaos at work therefore fraying her temper more than usual. It was hard enough to deal with all the extraterrestrial problems without the Earth handing her some old fashioned home grown ones.

The Doctor held up a finger while he gasped a little more. His suit looked rumpled and he had sweat through the shirt below it. Had he just run from the house to here? That seemed nonsensical but she had no better way to explain his condition.

"Rose, I just," He tried to slow down his breathing, and he snatched up her water glass and drained the rest of the contents before gasping a bit more. "You have to know," His lungs weren't quite ready to cooperate and he gave a shuddering cough before collapsing into his chair. "I was here hours ago. Well, an hour and a half ago which is almost hours so I really don't think it was too much of an exaggeration when all's said and done. These are for you."

Practically slumped over in exhaustion on his place setting, the Doctor held out the flowers and bag. Rose unfolded the arms that had been crossed over her chest as she observed the spectacle that was the Doctor in this moment, and accepted the flowers.

The bouquet was practically manic, with all sorts of things mixed in it. Had he just grabbed one of every flower in the shop while running at top speed? That's what it looked like. Conflicting colors, smells, and shapes were like an assault on her senses and she tried to force a smile to her face of appreciation instead of the gaping look she was currently sporting.

"It's, er, totally unique Doctor. Did you pick it out yourself?" She was afraid she'd start to laugh at any moment. The whole situation was ridiculous, a parody of what he'd meant it to be she was sure. But he was so well meaning, and it wasn't every day that she got flowers… The Doctor took a steadying breath and was happy to fill the silence.

"There's a whole language for flowers, Rose, but I'm sure you knew that what with your very floral name. I was looking at them and besides being crunched for time I thought that if every flower said something then a whole speech is more effective than a sentence." He swiped at his brow absently, his whole body still twitching from what had no doubt been quite an energetic task. "If the nearest flower shop hadn't been absolutely ages away this would have been easier. And of course it was similarly far away from any sort of chocolatier!"

Rose eyed the small brown bag curiously. "So you brought me flowers and chocolates?"

"Yes, but you have to realize just any sort of chocolate wasn't going to do. I had to find it fresh so I located the nearest factory and managed to talk a manager into giving me a sample just off the belt, so to speak. I wanted to make sure you knew that in case it got a little, herm, melty in the mean time."

Only the Doctor could talk his way into having a chocolate factory hand him a sample. It wasn't even so much that he had a silver tongue as the sheer volume of words combined with an undeniable charisma seemed to stun people into doing what he wanted. While she placed the flowers and chocolates near her handbag, she noticed the waitress come by to take the Doctor's order.

He made a quick, oddly nervous effort at reading the menu before saying he'd have whatever Rose was having. Despite looking a wreck and acting a clown the waitress was evaluating him with that slightly predatory gaze that Rose found herself disliking immediately. As soon as he had placed his order, Rose made sure to catch the Doctor's attention.

"So what inspired the last minute preparations? It's just dinner, you didn't have to go to all the trouble of flowers and chocolates." She'd admit it, she was fishing for an end to the ambiguity of it all.

"Actually, it was your mother's idea. Jackie can be very persuasive when she likes to be, though you can't tell her I said that." Rose seemed totally confused by this turn in the conversation, her eyebrows rising so high they looked determined to try to meet her hair line. "We were having a chat today, since I had a perfectly fantastic idea about a toy and I wanted to give it to Tony but Jackie made me promise to run ideas like that by her after the laser incident, and somehow that led to me finding you at lunch. She was just calling me up to check on things, but she pointed out that I was missing out on some very important symbols for Earth girls."

"She didn't put it like that did she?" It was impossible to think about her mother trying to coach the Doctor in how to, well, court her.

"No no. I believe it was more along the lines of 'you daft man, you better have some flowers and sweets for our Rose or else she probably doesn't know this is supposed to be a date.' I wish she'd decide if she's happy with me or angry at me."

"Maybe it runs in families." Rose said dryly. Not a very romantic date this was turning out to be. The fact that it was all orchestrated by her mother was curious though. Something to put away for a later chat, which would hopefully not result in an argument, but it felt like there was definite potential there for a difference in opinion.

The Doctor, finally taking the time to read into everything that had just occurred, said something that actually surprised Rose away from her musings. "This isn't very 'me' is it?"

"What? I wouldn't say that. In some ways this is very you." Well, everything he Doctor did tended to be colored by who he was. It wasn't precisely a lie.

"Wait right there." He got up, a look on his face more inspired than frantic and disappeared into the kitchen area. No one ever stopped him from doing things like that. Private, keep out, caution, etc. were all just suggestions to a man like him. Rose had spent years trying to emulate it, but she only had indifferent success. The difference of a few centuries practice, she assumed.

She felt like she was forever waiting for him. She wondered how much of her would always be waiting for him. There was a dreary thought. Out of the corner of her eye she caught the flowers and she picked them up and gave them another sniff. Depending on which corner she smelled she got a new scent. It was a cacophony, but she couldn't say it was unpleasant. Hungry, she snuck a chocolate as well. Dark and lumpy, she was unimpressed until she took a bite. Smooth, rich, flavorful, it really was impressive as chocolates went.

Maybe she needed to give the Doctor a second glance as well.

"Rose!" She saw the Doctor gesturing to her from the kitchen and she started to come over when he pointed at her bag. She got the message and picked it up along side her flowers.

"What are you on about now?"

"Something more me. Come on." He took the flowers from her and grabbed her now free hand. Sometimes she thought she'd follow him straight into hell if he led her there by the hand. She remembered that he very nearly had.

Up several flights of stairs, he led them to the roof access. A tablecloth was spread out for them. She felt the warm breeze and saw zepplins tool about in the distance as the sunset was just finishing. The roof was radiating off the day's heat and they were far enough up that the street noise wasn't going to overtly bother them. Despite herself, she was charmed.

"Dinner is already served as you can see, and pretty soon the stars will be out. I have some fabulous ideas for new names for constellations here. They aren't all the same in this world, you see. Some of them are downright curious, and I fully plan on finding out how some came to be once the TARDIS is grown up. Grissel the five-legged elephant is first on the list. I'll point it out to you."

In the half-light of evening, the Doctor looked particularly dashing. "Or you could help me figure out how to re-crate half the old Torchwood inventory without upsetting things." Rose suggested it half-heartedly, knowing her phone was full of messages even as they spoke.

He hadn't relinquished her hand as they sat down on the cloth, and it was so easy to scoot closer and lean onto his side as they watched a particularly low flying zeppelin twist around buildings. "There's always more work to be done, Rose. Tonight I want to tell stories. This Earth is just as amazing as our other one."

He looked her in the eyes and only let go of her hand to push back some hair the wind had blown in front of her face. The smile he gave her she was sure she mirrored. This was all part of how the Doctor seemed to carry that bit of magic about him, that feeling like he wasn't quite in step with reality but in that fabulous and exciting way that other people wanted to be a part of even if it led to danger or destruction in the end.

"But first: dinner. What _did_ you order for us? It looks like gobs of something…"

It occurred to Rose that maybe the Doctor had been waiting forever, too.


	12. 80 Days Later

"Do you want me to be human, or do you want me to be myself!"

Toe to toe, sweat pouring off of both of them as their lungs shuddered arhythmically to one another, Rose thought that if she didn't know for a fact that he couldn't regenerate she just might murder him right here.

It had been building for a while. After the infamous first date, (which she didn't consider to be one but since her mother did it became just as bothersome as if it had been) Rose thought that maybe spending more time with the Doctor intentionally would be a good move. Torchwood would eat your life if you let it, and Rose was hip deep in a lot of different projects (which seemed to mostly just consist of endless meetings with the occasional panicked saving of the world). The Doctor was there, but he was also fiddling with his own experiments, learning this world's historical discrepancies in minute detail, making sure the TARDIS was fed, and occasionally watching Tony.

Morning exercise had seemed like such a good idea.

Years of assuming she wasn't the brightest bulb in the box had left Rose a lot of time to improve her athletics and staying fit was one thing she enjoyed above just about anything. Some people naturally had a glow of fitness about them, but Rose maintained hers through running, weight training, and the yoga instructor that her mom had hired for them to have some mommy-daughter time. While Jackie had almost instantly decided a good shopping trip and a piece of cake was vastly preferable, Rose still kept going with the yoga.

The first time Rose had asked the Doctor to come out with her it had been on a whim, and when the springy gadget in his hand had fallen to the floor upon him wrapping eyes around her extremely tight and skimpy running outfit her stomach felt positively fluttery.

"I don't have anything to run in." he protested, trying to force his tall frame to stoop down and pick up the springy thing while not looking away from Rose.

"Oh, that's too bad. Tomorrow, then?" She never ran two days in a row, but the words were out now and she was surprised at how eager she was to have him do this with her.

"I'll be there with bells on."

"I hope you don't mean that literally."

"Well…"

"Doctor!"

Getting proper clothes clearly had slipped his mind when he showed up to run the next day in his pajama pants, a t-shirt, and his usual canvas shoes. Considering they had led a particularly active life together when travelling and he had done it all in a suit and those same shoes she decided to take it in stride. With smile all around they were off.

Rose took a number of different routes around the estate. She usually varied her pace, but the goal was to go an hour while pushing herself more than half that time. For the Doctor's sake she started off easy, but while he seemed perfectly happy to chatter to her about how this world hadn't had an Emperor Nero, she decided to ramp it up. His long legs matched her stride and his mouth never ran out of words.

What started out as a matter of curiosity started to honestly anger her. He could outrun her in distances, even though she could sprint a little faster on the outset. Longer than 50 meters and she couldn't compare. The Doctor could lift more weights, despite not even knowing how to work half the machines. He was a stronger swimmer. They went to a climbing wall and he was to the top when she was only a little past the half-way mark. All of this while never warmed up, never stretched out, or prepped in any manner.

There weren't a lot of things Rose was deeply prideful about, but her physical prowess had been. She had always been stronger and faster than anyone she knew who wasn't a professional athlete. At some point this had surpassed spending time together and become a straight up competition, at least to Rose. She was going to find something she could do better than the Doctor if it killed her, and the way her body was just about always aching these days it seemed like it actually might.

If someone had told Rose that the worst fight she would ever get into with the Doctor was over racquetball, she probably would have asked what they were smoking. But enough was enough, an hour and a half of intense play and she finally was at her breaking point. Once the ball smacked her in the back because she was so focused on the Doctor's positioning she lost it in a major way. It was a full on tantrum, complete with telling the Doctor where he could put his racquet.

Lucky for her, he was slightly more sensible than she was.

"Rose, you have to calm down. This can't be about the game. This isn't like you at all."

"I'll tell you what it's about, it's about you! How is it you can do everything so… so bloody well! You don't get dehydrated, you don't get tired, and it's all just so damn well _easy_ for you!"

"You can't compare yourself to me Rose. I'm not human. Human-ish maybe, moreso than I ever thought I'd be, but by no means human." He spread out his arms in that pose that practically proclaimed confusion, palms up, shoulders shrugged. "Do you want me to be human, or do you want me to be myself!"

"Right, the Time Lord that isn't a Time Lord." Whether it was her turn of phrase or her continued anger, she had finally struck a nerve and her powerful anger was immediately simmered down when she saw the Doctor's expression.

Grim, icy, he walked over to her slowly. Once the Doctor was looking down at her, his expression unreadable but for the malevolent glint in his eyes, he spoke quietly to her. "Understand this Rose: while there is nothing you can say or do to make me stop loving you, right now I don't like you very much. When you're ready to apologize, you'll know where to find me."

And he was gone.

Apologize? Who did he think he was? Ha!

After all he had clearly, uh, always won when they played games. And then there was that smug way he would… have a soda or a cup of tea waiting for her when she finally caught up on their runs.

Well, hell.

Damn him for being right!

Rose felt like a total heel. She had just thrown a fit at someone who had only been doing what she asked. It was totally immature and unreasonable, what she had done to him, and she knew she truly would have to apologize in a big way. Rose thought back to the time when she was fourteen and she had borrowed one of Jackie's necklaces for a party just down the way from the Estate. Somehow she had lost it and she just couldn't fess up, even when her mum spent all day looking for it a couple weeks later, and even when her mum had asked her if she knew where it had possibly gone. Eventually her friend's mum had found it while cleaning and her friend had brought it back. Fessing up hadn't felt any nicer, even when she had the lost item ready to hand back.

Being grounded for two weeks and no spending money for more than a month seemed just, back then, even lenient. She probably would have gladly stood in stocks she felt so badly about lying to her mum. What was a reasonable punishment for being a rotten friend?

The acidy knot in her stomach made her queasy.

***

"This is stupid, even for you!"

"Mum!"

"Well, I've had enough, I have! Him wandering around like he doesn't care and bumping into things half the time. You, little miss storm cloud, like you had the weight of the world on your shoulders. It's silly."

It was a cool afternoon, overcast, while Rose and Jackie sat in the kitchen and had a sandwich. The cook had tried to make something for them, but Jackie wasn't to be stopped and insisted he leave so she and Rose could have a chat.

"I want it stopped. You two are giving me indigestion. Your dad even commented on it the other day, and you know it's bad when even he's saying something. Tony burst into tear the other day. You're making the whole house miserable."

The rueben her mum had made up for her felt like swallowing a lump of lead. "It's only been four days. Don't be so dramatic."

"Ha! Four days!" Jackie brandished a pickle at Rose. "You were being a brat ages before that. Running yourself into the ground trying to keep up with the Doctor."

Rose didn't need to be reminded she had acted like an idiot. She thought about it all the time, but she just didn't know how to address it now. Something like this needed a grand gesture, probably. The Doctor liked heartfelt things. It wasn't something Rose could put into writing, she was rubbish at that poetry stuff. She couldn't paint or draw. Buying something was sort of silly, since it was all Pete's money anyway.

"Thanks for lunch mum, but I just feel sick to my stomach."

"That's the stress. Just get a few bites in anyway, you look too skinny. All a mother can do after a certain point is make sure you're warm and fed. If you can't finish it we'll just have leftovers."

Rose laughed. "We never eat leftovers! Ever since you hired a chef."

"Old habits. I just can't throw out good food."

The Doctor tended to scrounge extra bits out of the fridge. She knew because she caught him once when she was coming down for a midnight snack herself. It had been awkward, but she had just turned around and gone back upstairs without saying a word to him. It was all wrong, not being able to talk with him, or laugh about the day, or visit the growing TARDIS. Just a few months ago she wasn't sure how she could accept him into her life, and now…

"How would you say you were sorry, you know, if you had done something really bad?"

Jackie looked at Rose. "You have to figure it out for yourself. Doesn't mean much if it comes from me, don't you think?"

With a sigh of agreement they finished lunch and Rose was putting the dishes into the huge stainless steel deluxe cleaning machine to keep herself occupied when an idea struck her: food. If nothing else in this world, the Doctor liked a good meal. She could cook for him!

Wait, no, she was a terrible cook. Plus it was so hard to figure out what food he wanted to eat on any given day. The only thing he seemed to consume religiously was sweets, particularly fruit and biscuits. They went through criminal amounts of bananas for instance.

If she had to make a sweet thing, then, that was more baking. Baking never sounded as hard as cooking. It would be easy enough to whip up some homemade thing, and then she could show up at his door all smiles and whipped cream and she could set about finally trying to fix this mess.

***

Rose was immediately reminded why she had nearly failed science. The concepts themselves weren't that bad, but she never seemed to be able to get through a lab without messing up some major step without quite knowing how. When she had bought the cookbook the day before, she had been so excited. The banana cream pie, which looked and sounded more like a tart, seemed just the thing.

Start with the crust, it said, and she had that same day. It had taken two tries, but she had a very dark brown shortbread crust waiting in the freezer. Not too bad there, even if she had a blackened husk of a first crust attempt cautioning her about the dangers of being inattentive to the oven.

Whipped cream she could do no problem. That bit was just setting the mixer off and waiting for it to look like whipped cream. However, the pastry cream that was also the bulk of the pie was a different story. First of all, she hadn't remembered how fast milk froths up and over when you bring it to a boil. There was the smells of burnt milk and the sounds of cursing filtering out of the kitchen, she was sure. No one was allowed in while Rose was working, she had made that very clear, and now she was doubly glad so she could hide her shame. The rest of the process had been all about whisking. Rose thought her arm was going to fall off and she felt like she had never done anything else with her life other than stand over hot egg mixtures while whisking.

While the cream cooled, Rose took out the crust and the whipped cream from the fridge. The bananas just needed slicing and then she'd be all done except for the assembly part. As she sliced, Rose wondered about all the other things that could have gone wrong. It could be too sweet, the pudding filling could be lumpy, the crust could be too hard, and on and on until she realized she wasn't even chopping anymore. How long had she been standing there imagining worst case pie scenarios she couldn't have said, but she was pretty sure it was all an attempt to avoid thinking about the apology itself.

Assembly of the thing went fast enough, and the finished product looked enough like a pie that Rose felt pretty confident. All she had to do was carry it upstairs now, knock on the door, and present the pie. It would all work out.

Suddenly she noticed how many dishes she had created and how much of a sugary mess the kitchen was. There were people who would clean it all up, but at once Rose was seized with a need to stall the moment of truth just a bit more. The pie went into the fridge and she got to work cleaning. At some point the cook came back in and in dark tones warned her that if he couldn't access this kitchen like, five minutes ago, they would not be having dinner tonight.

Rather than fight, Rose had tossed up her hands and relinquished the kitchen to the ever colorful Roberto. There would be time enough to prostrate herself via baked goods.

Ultimately, when she found the pie half eaten the next morning, she was less than pleased.

***

However you dressed it up, it was still just half a pie. It felt incomplete and deficient, paralleling her own feelings rather uncomfortably. She thought about cutting it up and displaying it in some creative fashion, but Rose wasn't really feeling all that clever. It was probably better just to present it to him, and say she was sorry.

Hell, she had skipped work today for this. Time to face the music, pay the piper, and any other cliché that would take her mind off of the very real and tangible fact that she was scared to death that the Doctor was still angry at her. After all this time, how could he be? Then again, he had a very long memory.

It was early enough he might still be in his room, so she first checked the TARDIS' room. The strange iridescent lump just sort of existed in its nutritious fluid and she appealed to it momentarily as if it could understand her dilemma. Patting the tank, as if it were a peculiar pet, she made her way into the yard and out to the greenhouse where she was sure he wasn't. A grotesque fruit-like thing was growing from some hybridized project of his, but no Doctor in sight.

Standing outside of his room, she debated knocking or calling out to him. Should she wait and plan out something to say, or should she just let the moment carry her? Though considering how it carried her foot squarely into her mouth about as often as not she wasn't sure. Waiting until he emerged from his room was stupid.

"Just knock, Rose. It isn't that hard." Her hand was poised, but she was so tense that what was meant to be a light rap of the knuckles came out as a bellowing pounding. No running now.

He answered, opening the door to greet her with the cool eyes she wasn't used to seeing from him even now. The Doctor was impeccable in one of his best suits, glasses perched on his nose, and he made her feel small.

"I'm not, um, interrupting anything am I?"

"Not anything that can't wait."

"Well then." Rose stood there, rocking on her feet, pie clutched in front of her closely. "Er. I made you this pie. It's banana cream. I think it might be more like a tart than a pie. And, uh, it could be a bit lumpy and all since I don't know how to bake very well… but I think it must have turned out ok because someone ate half of it last night before I could give it to you."

She held it out in front of her, arms straight, and waited for him to take it.

"It's banana cream."

"You said that, Rose." He cracked a smile, but the mask went up again straight away as he took the pie from her. "Thank you for the pie."

They stood there and Rose just started at him like she had gone simple. Even stern like this he was impossibly handsome. She had been obsessing over this for so long it seemed so distressingly easy, so much so she was afraid she'd gotten it wrong. Best to just give it a shot.

"I'm not just here to have you eat my experiment in cooking, Doctor. I have to tell you how horribly, deeply sorry I am. I didn't act like a good friend or reasonable human being." Frustration at herself leaked into her voice, as it became louder and more emphatic. "I just wanted us to exercise together because I like it and now that you only have one life and all I wanted you to be healthy since you never went for a morning jog in the entire time I knew you. I couldn't imagine you getting sick again. But then it went all wrong and I was just so jealous! You're so brilliant and it's all so easy for you, even the things it took me years to do and learn."

The Doctor didn't look remote anymore, he looked concerned and even a little surprised.

"I guess for the first time I felt like, I'd never be worthy. Or something." Rose ran her hands through her hair. "No, that's not quite right. I don't even know what I'm saying. I'm just sorry, ok? I'm sorry. Please don't tell me if the pie is wretched."

Rose took a deep breath and did an about face to go back to her room and have a good scream into her pillow when she felt a warm hand on her shoulder stopping her.

"It's delicious, Rose." He whispered into her ear. "I know because I'm the one who ate most of it already. Sorry about that, didn't know it was special."

Overwhelmed, Rose spun to face the Doctor and practically crushed his lips to hers as he attempted not to drop the pie with one hand and balance them with the other. She had one hand on either lapel of his suit jacket, keeping him from backing away as she loaded that last bit of apology into her kiss along with relief and something else that made her feel warm all over in that slightly tingly way.

They broke away only when Rose needed air, and the Doctor looked at her with equal parts confusion, happiness, and hunger. "In the future Rose, though I must admit I'm very fond of your baking, when you need to apologize you can skip the pie and get straight to that part." He gave her a wicked smile, one that saw into the near future and liked what it saw.

Rose suddenly felt like Pandora.


	13. 167 Days Later

The Doctor, Rose decided, was thoroughly and frustratingly very much a tease.

Years of friendship, months of dating, and days of her practically throwing herself at him and still she couldn't hit the veritable home run with him. Had she lost her touch? It had been, well, years after all. It horrified her to think about actually. Was it like riding a bicycle? Is it the sort of thing you couldn't possibly forget? Was it like playing a sport and the more time spent away the worse you got at it?

Being neurotic over these sorts of questions was only a mild distraction away from the bigger question of why not, as in: why the hell is he not jumping at the chance? In some ways he was such a normal-ish man, impulsive and driven by his desires, but then on the one thing she thought she could count on him responding to in a truly normal manner and he threw a curve at her once again. He certainly had no problems touching her, or kissing her, as he proved by taking so many opportunities to do just that that sometimes she had to remind him of other things that had to be done in the day.

She had even been late to work so many times in the past week because of the Doctor distracting her that she was getting knowing smiles from people. The smiles wouldn't be half so embarrassing if they were right in their assumptions! The way their eyes darted down to her hands now and again, looking for the ring, it was almost as if everyone around them was about ten steps ahead from reality.

"You two could stand to be a little less, uh, intense." Jackie watched her daughter slump on the couch in the dressing room, watching a television monitor out of the corner of her eye. They were supposed to be having mother-daughter time, but Rose was a million miles away.

"What's that, mum? That's not your color, by the way, too orange."

Jackie peeled the designer coat off, angry that now that she could afford the darn things so few of them fit or complemented her looks. "This is peach, not orange, and I said that you and your Doctor need to take things a little more slowly. If we were back in our old place, everyone would be talking."

"Mum! It isn't like I'm flouncing around in lingerie or something all day long." Rose wondered if maybe that would be the answer. Maybe they could make a quick stop at another store after this one. "Besides, I've known him for years."

"Yes, luv, but you knew Mickey for years and you could still get to work on time and without being forced to wear turtleneck jumpers."

Rose dropped her face in her hands, embarrassed and irritated. "You're right! I know! I'm just going out of my mind!"

"I love you, you're my daughter, but I really wish you'd been a little less work mad the past year or so and made some girlfriends. You need someone who can knock some perspective into you, and you don't look like you're wanting to talk about this with me right now." Jackie had changed the peach jacket out for a green one with slanted wide pinstripes. "How about this one?"

Rose lifted her head out of her hands. "You look like a lime zebra."

It was one of those annoying things about growing up she had noticed, that her mom was often more right than wrong about relationship things. And honestly, even though Rose had always had a boy in her life, she had always had at least a number of girlfriends to talk with and eat with and laugh with… it seemed like there had been no time for laughing when she had been stranded here the first time.

"I don't know how I ended up with such a mean daughter. Switched at birth, I'm sure."

"Let's go get some chips, mum. I promise I'll love whatever else you put on today, really!"

As they were walking out, her mother clutching the lime zebra coat in one hand, Rose heard her phone jingle. It was work, as usual. Someone had misplaced the visiting goodwill ambassador from the Yinz Federated Monetary Alliance, who happened to look like a blowfish with legs and was about the size of a large paperweight. Rose strongly suspected this was an elaborate practical joke, but you just couldn't chance these things. She got warnings like this all the time, but she was just part of the mass list for something small like this and she didn't worry about it too much.

What it did remind her of was that there were a number of women at Torchwood that she had been working with for years, but knew absolutely nothing about. Maybe one of them would make a good friend.

"I feel like I'm in primary school again." Rose mumbled to herself. Worrying about making friends, bah! They had always just happened naturally before when she had normal jobs. Even travelling with the Doctor, people had just wandered in and out of their lives. Maybe it would be worth it to see if this reality had a Captain Jack as well. But if it were anything like the Mickey incident, then maybe it was better not to know.

"A lot of life feels that way. Now let's find somewhere to get a bite."

***

"Am I difficult to get on with?"

"What? No. What brought that on, Rose?" The Doctor gazed at her through industrial strength goggles that made him look like a goldfish. He was about to light a welding torch to construct some sort of new water purification system for rainwater when Rose had wandered in to his workshop to distract him. The TARDIS bubbled benignly in the corner, and Rose could have sworn she was already looking a little blue even if she still was an amorphous blob of coral.

"Nothing." She was terrible at lying to him. "Well, I mean, I don't have anyone to spend time with other than you, mum, dad, and Tony."

"I really think you and Donna would have gotten along splendidly. It's a shame you barely got to meet her." He got that sad faraway look tinged with nostalgia, the way he always got when he talked about past companions. She didn't ask about them very often, even though she was intensely curious about the life he'd lived before she knew him. It seemed like the Time War had created a barrier to him being able to revisit the old days without the pain of remembering how his people had been and where they had ended up. No matter their shared past and present, he had parts of him he just wasn't willing to share.

He started up the torch and Rose found herself shouting her thoughts at him. "Yeah, maybe, but I need a girlfriend here and now!"

"What about Tess from the Reclamation Department?" The Doctor supplied, even as he worked.

Rose shook her head, as she yelled back. "No good, she's hated me since I got promoted over her out of nowhere when I first got here."

"There's Susan in Accounting."

"Sweet girl, but she's having a baby soon. I think she's a bit occupied in her free time at the moment."

"Really? I just thought she was fond of those pastries." The Doctor paused to examine his work before turning off the torch and pushing the goggles up on top of his head. "There's a few women on the internal security team. I've seen you eat lunch with them before."

Feeling discouraged, Rose wandered over to the TARDIS tank and put her hand up against the side. "I suppose."

"This isn't like you, you know. I've seen you enter hostile territory and come out with bosom buddies of every shape, size, color, and level of sentience. Why you're fretting about who you're going to have a chat with around the water cooler is just madness."

"That's gossip around the water cooler."

"Not the point," he said with a touch of irritation. "Is this why you've been a bit, oh I don't know, drifty the past couple days? Here hold this a moment." He handed her a large bolt while he affixed two pipes together on some sort of casing. The king of rapid topic shifts. Attention always divided, sometimes Rose was tempted to tell him any old thing and see if he caught it. It was almost assured that his big Time Lord brain would, which was especially exasperating.

She felt along the cold metal edges slowly as she thought about how to answer him. _I need girlfriends so I can talk about how you won't sleep with me in the biblical fashion_, just didn't have the kind of ring to it that would open up the topic for discussion. And honestly, she had more than enough discussion time with the Doctor. It was time for some action.

"Drifty, am I? Well then, I think it's about time I _drifted_ somewhere else."

"Rose that's not what I mea—"

"Drifting!" And after she set the bolt back on the workbench she stomped her way upstairs, knowing she was being childish.

***

A stolen teddy bear clutched to her chest, Rose wondered if Tony would even notice. She had needed to hug something and this seemed like a good alternative to finding a family member and being mopey at them. There had been a moment of self-pitying tear welling, but she managed to stuff it back down before anything fell. It was supremely stupid to feel this alone when she had tons of people who loved her (in multiple realities even). All of this self-doubt, all of this silly infantilizing angst, all because she didn't feel sexy?

That didn't seem right.

"Ok, Rose," she said softly out loud. "Think this through." She plopped down on her bed, stuffed bear and all, and began to ponder.

Time to take stock:

Family was healthy and happy

Money was no longer an issue

She had a good job where people largely respected her

Cooking and cleaning was totally optional for her

She had a boyfriend who was a time travelling alien

Was there anything actually wrong with her life? It was hard to think of anything besides physical frustration that caused any real stress. Maybe that was it, an embarrassment of riches. It's almost a terrible thing to get everything you ever asked for and more. Family, satisfying work, love; it was almost like she needed to create her own… oh.

Maybe she was creating her own problems just to have problems. What a terrible thing the human brain was, like the impulse to fight over a scrap of food when the pantry was full to bursting. People had to make their own troubles just to keep occupied sometimes, and that would certainly explain why everything seemed to be so damn difficult to resolve. If she didn't actually want to resolve it on some deeper level, then it just wasn't going to happen.

This was probably the kind of thing a normal person would go into therapy for, Rose thought. But the wisest and most understanding person she knew was also the source of all her most recent woe. The first instinct to seek out the Doctor and talk to him was almost overpowering anyway.

Rose stared at the teddy bear accusingly, rolling around on her bed to hear the gentle squeak of the springs. It reminded her of a song she had heard a long time ago on the radio. She was trying to hum it to herself while she debated asking her mum if she knew any good therapists when there was a gentle knock at her door.

Sitting up on the bed and folding her legs under her, she saw the Doctor peek his head in her room with his hair wild and his eyes rolling about. He searched for her around the room before he saw her and then he seemed to start as he let himself in the rest of the way.

"I didn't say you could come in, did I?" Rose hurumphed at him. The Doctor got a sincerely confused but reticent expression and began to retreat when she stopped him. "But I suppose you're welcome enough anyway. Come on over here, you look like you expect me to bite your head off."

"Well, you have to admit your behavior as of late has been most erratic. And I have to say I think I might be a bit off my game what with totally missing on the whole Susan being pregnant thing. Must be losing my touch picking up on all those human signals for things. I thought I was doing so well, too, considering some of my senses are—shall we say—a bit dulled in this particular incarnation." He paced around the room, his shirt sleeves rolled up, clothes rumpled, goggle marks still on his face from the welding, and all over looking awkwardly adorable.

Rose hated it that she wanted him, even when he was like this. Had to be something broken with her hormones.

"You're babbling." She commented to him, while picking at the ear of the poor teddy bear. "Come over here."

The Doctor sat on the corner of her bed, back straight as a signpost, eyes wide, hands clutching his knees tightly. He regarded her with wariness, but kindness and curiosity too. He was so serendipitous with his timing, now if she could just choke out the words for better or for worse.

"I think I've got a problem." The Doctor began to say something but she interrupted him. "I know you want to launch into a million questions before you hear everything, but let me go on a bit first." Rose cleared her throat as she watched the Doctor's brow knit in that cranky way he had when he was being foiled in one of his habits. He didn't like waiting his turn to talk.

"Ahem." Now that she had him here and she was ready to just say it, it seemed silly. "I've been all up in arms about making friends but that's just because I had another thing on my mind. You see, uh, we've… why is this so hard to say…we've been—well I guess you'd call it dating—_dating_ for some time now. You'd agree, yes? Just nod if you agree." The Doctor nodded, his face impassive.

Rose clutched the teddy bear with both hands, kneading the fluffy insides as the terror of what she was saying began to sink in. A bead of sweat was forming at the top of her forehead. Her mouth felt dry. "We're very close. Ah, um, physically. But, you see… come on Rose you aren't some blushing schoolgirl… I feel like we could be _closer_."

The Doctor's eye seemed to twitch just barely.

"Physically."

Rose started down, afraid to see his expression now.

"Intimately."

Now she was afraid she was the one babbling.

"Biblically?"

If the ground opened up and swallowed her, it would not have been unwelcome in that moment. A blush began to creep over her body, slowly and then in a rush like an embarrassment dam had broken and was sweeping through the countryside of her mind. She wished her hair were longer, so it could shield her better than it was doing now. Crawling under the covers and pretending not to be there was another possibility.

"So this is all about sex?" That the Doctor would say it so plainly, in that vaguely disgusted voice, simply confirmed all her fears. Now it would come, the rejection, or some weird physiological problem she never would have guessed existed with his Time Lord body. All sorts of nightmare scenarios whispered fragments of sentences to her consciousness.

"You're going around driving yourself half-mad, and everyone around you to distraction with worry about you, just because we haven't had sex yet?" She still couldn't look at him, but she could see by his posture in the corner of her eye that he was no longer tense. In fact he was pulling at his shoes, and it was only when one of them landed across the room with a thud that she looked up at his face. The wide smile there was enough to send her already pounding heart into something irregular and anticipatory.

"Did it every occur to you, Rose Tyler, that I was waiting for you to let me know that you were ready for something like that? I thought women were all about reading signals, and I've been giving you green lights like mad for ages!" The buttons on his shirt hardly seemed to take him any time, and he stood to work at his belt with impatience. "We've been at one another like teenagers but I knew there's no way I was going to push the issue. Especially when it's been, well, quite some time since I've engaged in that sort of thing."

He paused in the divesting of his clothing as if realizing something for the first time. He sat down suddenly on the bed, wearing nothing but his trousers and an undershirt. "What if I'm terrible at it? Oh Rose," he turned to her, grabbing her hands with both of his. "You have to promise not to judge me. I'm sure it's not the kind of thing you forget but it's been a human lifetime since I even considered sex and…" the Doctor trailed off as he noticed Rose was shaking with suppressed laughter. "I don't see what's so funny about any of this." He sounded a bit wounded.

"This whole time," Rose tried not to sound angry, but there was a bit of it mixed into the wonder and the humor of it all. "All I needed to do was _ask_?"

The Doctor stood, pulled Rose up off the bed and into his arms crushing the bear between them, and kissed her. It wasn't one of those sweet, tender, half-open mouthed kisses that they parted with in the morning, or the sloppy, fun kisses he used when he wanted to make her smile. The kiss he gave her was all heat and promise, demanding and selfish as his tongue probed through her mouth even as she felt a very human part of his anatomy poke into her abdomen. She pulled the bear out from between them to toss it across the room and subsequently grab something else that had the Doctor gasping her name in a way she hoped she'd hear a lot more in the near future.

"I'll make you a deal," Rose said as they finally broke apart, eyes bright and bodies aching to discard the rest of their clothes. "If we're both rubbish at this then we just have to practice until we get it right."

"Oh most definitely." The Doctor agreed emphatically, cupping her breast with one hand and running his lips down the side of her neck.

While what they would no doubt do in the next few hours would not solve all of her problems, Rose felt pretty sure that at least she wasn't going to need a therapist. However, she had to get some girl friends stat because there was no way in this universe that she was going to talk about this night with her mother.


End file.
